Is NATO dead?

OPINION:

President Trump has never been fond of NATO, and for good reason.

After NATO’s 1949 founding and the Marshall Plan (1948-1951), NATO nations essentially fell asleep regarding their own defense spending.

The Marshall Plan — named for Secretary of State George Catlett Marshall, the greatest secretary of state before Marco Rubio — poured more than $13 billion into Europe to revive its industrial and agricultural production. Even Germany and Italy, our enemies in World War II, benefited greatly.

Then came the Cold War, and Europe and NATO were content to be protected from Soviet aggression by the U.S. “nuclear umbrella.” They left their defense, and its expense, to us.

Mr. Trump has been sounding the alarm about NATO defense spending since his first term. Most member nations were supposed to have met NATO’s 2006 agreement to spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense by 2025. At a summit in The Hague, Netherlands, they agreed to spend 5% of GDP on defense. That isn’t happening.

Most NATO nations fall well short of the 5% goal, and many don’t reach the 2% goal. Germany, the strongest economy in Europe, spent about 1.9% of its GDP on defense in 2024. Britain spent about 2.3% in 2023-2024; France, about 2.1%; Greece, about 3%; Spain, only about 1.28%; and Italy, about 1.5%.

Mr. Trump’s unreasonable demand that Denmark give us Greenland, which is a necessary base for his Golden Dome missile defense system, left NATO aghast. The president hasn’t let up on blaming NATO, sometimes for good cause.

Mr. Trump’s patience with NATO is apparently at an end. He wrote last week on Truth Social: “The United States has been informed by most of our NATO ‘Allies’ that they don’t want to get involved with our Military Operation against the Terrorist Regime of Iran, in the Middle East, this, despite the fact that almost every Country strongly agreed with what we are doing, and that Iran cannot, in any way, shape, or form, be allowed to have a Nuclear Weapon. I am not surprised by their action, however, because I always considered NATO, where we spend Hundreds of Billions of Dollars per year protecting these same Countries, to be a one-way street — We will protect them, but they will do nothing for us, in particular, in a time of need.”

Mr. Trump concluded that we don’t need anyone’s help. He wrote last week, also on Truth Social, that the NATO nations are “COWARDS, and we will REMEMBER!”

Is NATO over? It seems so. Mr. Trump would have it be, but is NATO necessary for our defense? It seems not to be because these nations have not even agreed to force an end to Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, where much of their natural gas and oil come from.

If NATO is at an end, then what can we do to protect our allies in Europe?

Should we end our “special relationship” with Britain? Should we just abandon our other NATO allies to Russian and Chinese aggression?

We shouldn’t do any of those things. Yet if Mr. Trump tries to renegotiate the NATO treaty to require more defense spending — and to throw Turkey out of NATO, as it should be — he will fail. The NATO nations, comfortable in their social welfare states, will not respond other than to give him more bad press.

Mr. Trump can’t simply opt out of the NATO treaty. The Chuck Schumer-controlled Senate would not affirm our deratification of that treaty.

Mr. Trump is stuck with the NATO treaty. Our Article 5 obligation to defend those nations if they are attacked still stands, whether he likes it or not. NATO will remain fat, happy and complacent while we are stuck with the continuing cost of defending its members.

Last week, Mr. Trump threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants unless the Strait of Hormuz was reopened in two days. Before that deadline ended, the president wrote on Truth Social that over two days, the U.S. and Iran had held “productive” conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of hostilities in the Middle East.

Unless the war with Iran ends with the fall of the ayatollahs’ regime, we will have failed to prevent Iran from becoming nuclear-armed. China and North Korea have both said that they became nuclear powers for fear of U.S. “aggression.” Iran will do the same.

If we end the Iran war before the fall of the regime in Tehran, it won’t be NATO’s fault. It will be ours alone, and it will have a horrible result.

• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and a contributing editor for The American Spectator.