Former President Donald Trump harbors a deep-seated antipathy toward NATO that goes back decades.
The businessman in him sees the alliance — credited with deterring war in Europe for the last 75 years — as a bad deal, simply from a dollars and cents perspective.
“I think a lot of people are tired of watching other countries ripping off the United States. This is a great country. They laugh at us behind our backs, they laugh at us because of our own stupidity,” Trump said in a 1987 appearance on CNN’s Larry King Live.
When a caller suggested that NATO and West Germany “should pay their way,” Trump was quick to agree. “If you look at the payments that we’re making to NATO, they’re totally disproportionate with everybody else’s. And it’s ridiculous,” he said.
Flash forward 30 years when Trump is president and, according to many of those who worked most closely with him on national security issues, obsessed with trashing NATO and spending much of his first term trying to find an excuse for withdrawing from the alliance altogether.
“I was there with him in the spring of 2018, at the NATO summit in Brussels, where he damn near did get out of NATO,” Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton said. “He is serious about it. And whether you’re a Trump supporter, or a Trump opponent, don’t think he’s kidding about this one.”
His former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said in a recent interview, “Trump has a disdain for NATO. He doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t understand the importance to our own security.”
Trump’s former U.N. ambassador and now political rival Nikki Haley said on CNN, “He talked many times about getting out of NATO behind closed doors and publicly. So that’s just a fact.” Haley added what Trump does seem to get is that NATO is the “strongest alliance in history.”
Haley said, “Understand NATO is a success story. For 75 years, we haven’t had war there. And more than that, Russia is completely intimidated by NATO. They have never invaded a NATO country. They have always invaded those that are not NATO. Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, those are the ones they have invaded. So not only is Russia intimidated by NATO. China’s intimidated by NATO.”
It’s an argument that never resonated with Trump, according to Bolton. “This is exactly his view of alliances. They’re totally transactional. It’s like you add up every day, how much did you spend? How much did we spend?”
Much of Trump’s fury with NATO allies “who don’t pay up” is predicated on his inability or unwillingness to accept the nuances of NATO funding. He always frames the issue inaccurately — as he did recently at a rally — as a matter of NATO members owing years of back contributions to the alliance and being “delinquent” on their current “payments.”
“I think what we need to be clear about is no one is delinquent,” Julianne Smith, U.S. ambassador to NATO, said in response to Trump’s threat. “This is not a country club. There are no dues here at NATO. Instead, what we have all committed to do is to invest in our own national defense.”
In Trump’s telling, when he was president, he went to NATO and put the fear of God into the allies who, in his mind, were in arrears in their back dues.
“They said, ‘Well, if we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They couldn’t believe the answer,” Trump told the crowd in Conway, South Carolina. “In fact, I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want.”
“I think he made that conversation up,” says Bolton, who in his 2020 book, The Room Where It Happened, documents many of Trump’s more fanciful and grandiose claims.
“That’s a fairly typical Trump thing to do, because it makes it sound very dramatic and proving his point,” Bolton said. “But just because that conversation is made up, people should not think that he’s making up the point about withdrawing, or that he doesn’t particularly care what Russia does to those who don’t spend adequately on their own defense.”
The bedrock principle of the NATO alliance is embodied in Article 5 of its charter, namely that an attack against one member is an attack on all. Put another way, an attack on the smallest, weakest country is an attack on the United States.
Trump has never liked that idea.
In his book, Bolton recounts a raucous breakfast meeting at the July 2018 NATO summit in Brussels, during which Trump questioned the whole idea of collective defense in a private back-and-forth with a stunned NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.
As soon as the press left the event, Trump lit into Stoltenberg with a tsunami of complaints.
“NATO, he marched on, was very important to Europe, but its value to the U.S. was less apparent,” Bolton wrote. “On Trump rolled, asking why we should enter World War III on behalf of some country not paying its dues, like Macedonia.”
“Stoltenberg tried occasionally to break in to answer, but he never got far,” Bolton recounts. At one point, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis tried to say a few words defending NATO, “but Trump swatted him away.”
In the weeks before that 2018 NATO summit, Trump showed how little understanding he had of NATO’s target for all member nations to spend 2% of GDP on defense by 2024, with at least 20% going for weapons and equipment.
Trump floated the idea of threatening to cut America’s NATO “contribution” to match Germany’s 1.2% level of “contribution.”
Of course, since the money is not a contribution or a payment, but the percentage of GDP spent on each country’s own defense, what Trump was proposing would cut the U.S. defense budget by 75%.
“Whether Trump ever understood this, and simply misused the word ‘contribution,’ I could never tell,” Bolton wrote.
Trump wanted to show his displeasure with NATO — and in particular Germany, for its deal to buy natural gas from Russia over the new Nord Stream 2 pipeline — by making a historic announcement at the summit: the U.S. would be withdrawing from NATO unless his demands were met.
In a phone call before the summit, Bolton warned Stoltenberg that Trump was no longer listening to his advisers.
But in the end, Trump took Bolton’s advice that in expressing his displeasure with NATO, he should “go up to the line, but don’t cross it,” and a crisis was averted.
Trump’s supporters insist his recent comments about encouraging Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” with any NATO nation who doesn’t “pay up” is just a theatrical negotiating tactic.
Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) accused the news media of “cherry-picking” Trump’s remarks.
“What the president was saying and asking of all of us is, if we continue to pay, Europeans know that we’re going to subsidize their defense budget, so that they can pour money, their money, into their social programs,” Waltz said on Fox. “Why would they ever pay up?”
“Virtually every American president at some point in some way has complained about other countries in NATO not doing enough. Trump’s just the first one to express it in these terms,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said on CNN.
“He’s telling a story. And, frankly, look, Donald Trump is not a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He doesn’t talk like a traditional politician. But I have zero concern because he’s been president before. I know exactly what he has done and will do with the NATO alliance,” Rubio said. “But there has to be an alliance. It’s not America’s defense with a bunch of small junior partners.”
“I would say to Marco, for whom I have an awful lot of respect, if you don’t think Trump is serious about getting out of NATO, then why did you recently co-sponsor legislation requiring approval by two-thirds of the House and the Senate before a president can withdraw from NATO?” Bolton countered. “Is there some other president or would-be president out there that you think is going to withdraw other than Donald Trump?”
The provision, co-sponsored by Rubio and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), was signed into law by Biden in December and would require the “advice and consent of the Senate or an Act of Congress before suspending, terminating, or withdrawing U.S. membership in NATO.”
If Trump were to violate it, the question of the law’s constitutionality would likely be tested in the court, given that while the Constitution gives the president to power to make treaties with the Senate’s consent, the power to break treaties is not as clear.
But as his former defense secretary points out, there are many ways Trump could undermine NATO without withdrawing from the alliance.
“He could pull troops out. He could declare that he will not support a NATO ally, just like he did,” Esper said. “We could withdraw ourselves from NATO formations.”
“I think one of the first things he’ll do is move to cut off all funding for Ukraine. The next thing he’ll probably do is to begin withdrawing troops from key countries unless they meet a spending commitment. But ultimately, he will try to withdraw from NATO.”
And that, argues everyone from President Joe Biden to Nikki Haley to John Bolton, would hand a victory to Vladimir Putin bigger than he could have ever imagined.
“I mean, if Trump is elected, there will be celebrations in the Kremlin, there’s no doubt about it,” Bolton said.
“Donald Trump is siding with a thug who kills his political opponents. He’s siding with someone who has made no bones about wanting to destroy America,” Haley said. “He’s siding with someone who arrests American journalists and holds them hostage. And he’s siding with a dictator instead of siding with our allies, who stood with us at 9/11.”
The only time NATO’s Article 5 has been invoked was after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, when NATO allies went to war with the United States in Afghanistan.
Of the more than 3,600 combat deaths in that war, fully one-third were from NATO or other partner nations.
“Trump gave an invitation to Putin to invade some of our NATO allies,” Biden said after Trump’s remarks. “Can you imagine a former president of the United States saying that? The whole world heard it. The worst thing is he means it. … For God’s sake, it’s dumb. It’s shameful. It’s dangerous. It’s un-American.”
Meanwhile, NATO defense spending is way up and is now at 2% of the combined GDP of the 31 member nations, and 18 members have met or exceeded the 2% goal.
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At the same time, U.S. defense spending is expected to slip to 2.7% of GDP, down from 4.5% in 2010 when the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were raging.
“There is ONLY one president who really deserves credit for really boosting European spending,” retired Adm. James Stavridis, a former Supreme NATO commander, posted on X. “Not Trump, but President Putin.”
