The spectre of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) own demise looms once again over transatlantic relations as Donald Trump, President-elect of the United States (US), returns to the White House on 20th January. Predicting Trump’s foreign policy is difficult. Whether as a matter of strategy and disposition, Trump is mercurial. Nevertheless, we do have a body of knowledge that can help inform how we should think about NATO’s prospects in the foreseeable future. What we know about how military alliances have come to an end may be indicative of NATO’s own present state in 2025. In a nutshell, they point to NATO’s continued longevity.
Of course, the history of NATO is a history of crisis and so the topic of conversation is as old as the alliance itself. Even at the beginning, no one wanted to be its first Secretary General because of the low expectations many had for transatlantic security cooperation. Not long after assuming such an undesirable position, Lord Ismay remarked in 1953 with dismay that the Alliance ‘was going downhill’ due to a perceived lack of European support for going about a defence buildup. More recently, no one wanted Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of NATO (2014-2024), to leave his post. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 discouraged any change at the top which could occasion internal discord.
NATO’s history has been tumultuous for several reasons. The obvious explanation relates to the high stakes involved. The alliance exists to underpin order and stability in a crowded continent that historically has been so beset by hostility that two world wars broke out in the span of thirty-five years. Prior to the Second World War, military alliances were unstable political arrangements prone to turnover and reneging.
And so NATO’s eventual success in bringing about peace in Europe was hardly assured at the outset. At the start of the Cold War, both Britain – known as ‘Perfidious Albion’ – and America had a history of avoiding any lasting commitments abroad. Europe’s record was of discord, not collaboration.
Over the decades, those doubts about US engagement and Europe’s seriousness about its own security persisted.
Military alliances might end for different reasons. A common view is that these instruments of military and diplomatic power last as long as the strategic circumstances and interests which produced them hold. Once they achieve their aim, the raison d’être of the alliance is no more. In this telling, Trump would attempt to discard NATO because it has long beaten the Soviet Union, the primary threat that the US confronted in the Cold War. The Alliance no longer aligned with his strategic vision that pits the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Indo-Pacific at the centre of his grand strategy. NATO is obsolete and ends as a result.
The problem with this perspective is that only a small minority of alliances end because they fulfil their original mission. After all, NATO already survived the collapse of the Soviet Union. Crucially, one may argue that the central task of NATO was not so much fending off that adversary but to keep Europe in balance, particularly under British-American leadership. If so, preventing a security vacuum through strong transatlantic links remains essential, and the US would cede much influence by dispensing with it.
Military defeat is another way for why an alliance could end. When battlefield performance is poor, the states making up the alliance experience massive upheaval and so the commitment withers away. The Dual Alliance between Germany and Austria in the First World War comes to mind. Had it not been for Russia in 2014, NATO was perhaps at risk of obsolescence considering its poor military showing in Afghanistan and the frustration that several allies had felt because of it.
Instead of outright termination, a military alliance could meet its demise through downgrading. This possibility seems most relevant regarding NATO and Trump. Bringing an official end to a military alliance as comprehensive and institutionally well-developed as NATO might be too costly of an action. Washington might be interested in cooperating with its NATO allies less now than in the past, but it does not want to take bold steps which could encourage adversaries either. The US could lose interest, roll back its involvement in joint military exercises, participate in fewer consultations, and pull forward deployed forces away from allied territory. In effect, absent countries such as the UK, Germany and Poland stepping up, the military alliance would become zombified, existing mostly on paper, much like how the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO) lumbered until its final expiry in 1979.
Trump will likely make NATO a lesser priority, but to what extent is hard to tell. He has already selected Matt Whittaker to be the US Permanent Representative to NATO. That Whittaker is a loyal friend of Trump’s suggests that the President-elect at least cares enough about the alliance to eschew, for now, the easiest way to paralyse it.
Since Trump’s first term in office, the US Senate has made it harder for the president to pull back from the Alliance. Senate votes on NATO-related issues have seen a much broader consensus on the value of preserving US commitment to European security than what was the case when lawmakers contemplated a large-scale military withdrawal from Europe in the 1970s.
The US may yet pull back forces from Europe. Joe Biden, the outgoing president, is leaving office with over 65,000 military personnel in Europe, at about the same level in early 2021 but down from 100,000 in 2022. Towards the end of his first mandate, the Trump administration considered a plan – one not completely without merit – to restructure some forces in Europe and to return others to the continental US. It was shelved due to Biden’s election, but some updated version of it may yet receive new attention. Even so, that plan was not a repudiation of NATO.
Trump may yet be convinced of NATO’s importance if Europe continues to build-up its military capabilities to tackle threats from Russia and, for that matter, the PRC. Indeed, NATO’s official line against the PRC has hardened, rather than softened, during the Biden years.
All these considerations suggest NATO will yet survive the next four years in one form or another.
Regardless, Trump’s second presidency will be full of alliance friction. Trump has good reason to demand greater European defence spending.
However, European countries are experiencing economic headwinds and growing government dysfunction. However, they might face a real limit in going about the investments that the Trump administration wishes to see from them.
Crucially, Trump’s own rhetoric engenders little confidence. In one press conference alone, Trump intimated that he could use military force against the Danish territory of Greenland while somehow using ‘economic force’ to make Canada the biggest and most populous state of the American union. Such overheated rhetoric only creates distrust at the political level. It can stoke anti-American sentiment abroad, which could lead more European citizens to see other great powers such as the PRC or even Russia as welcome alternatives in international politics. Although military-to-military relations within NATO were solid through Trump’s first time in office, their perseverance cannot be taken for granted in the coming years.
Dr Alexander Lanoszka is an Associate Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy and Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of Waterloo.
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As an X commenter put it: "Americans are tired of hearing 'Yankee go home' and then when there's a problem, 'Yankee come back!'".