Everything is Under Control, Situation Normal
June’s NATO summit hopefully was NATO just stalling for time rather than actually believing it was winning President Trump over.
Last month, NATO held a summit at The Hague which featured plenty of awkward moments, but none more cringe-inducing than Mark Rutte calling Donald Trump “Daddy”. This post isn’t going to spend time on that particular turn of phrase and the White House’s follow-up video, but we can all come together to agree that it was weird.
Instead, the goal of this post is to point out that while everyone was smiling faces and cheerful consensus at the summit, NATO leaders outside the United States should not be lulled into believing anything material has changed. The United States remains a deeply unreliable partner whose evolving definition of self-interest, as laid out by J.D. Vance at the Munich Conference earlier this year, is in many ways potentially hostile to its allies. The Trump White House continues to veer back and forth on tariff threats and pick fights with neighbors in ways that are unpredictable. This morning brings reports that the United States is fully cutting off Ukraine from key aid.
In this context, getting Trump to say the words about Article 5 at the summit should be viewed as putting up a front. A liar’s forecast cannot be trusted and there is little reason to believe that Trump’s core skepticism about America’s traditional allies will survive contact with any real crisis. Instead, European and Canadian national security policy should accurately understand that they have secured the appearance of US support for a few months more while working to ensure that they are not actually at the mercy of the US should Russia take steps actively hostile to the alliance.
Ongoing increases in defense spending are helpful and should provide more independence, but this spending increase has to be matched by the acquisition and deployment of capabilities that currently reside almost solely with the United States. Across a range of critical technology categories - strategic airlift, advanced intelligence sharing and targeting, precision munitions, and air & missile defense systems, NATO allies are incapable of sustained, independent operations without US support. No amount of warm words can change how risky this is given the increasingly wide chasm between America’s previous posture and its new one.