How Donald Trump Got NATO to Pay Up

The headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in Brussels, with eight crisscrossing glass-and-steel wings, was designed to resemble a set of interlocking fingers—a reference to what its architect called “the coming together of all nations in one common space.” Inside, the allocation of that space reflects certain geopolitical realities. The nine-person delegation from Iceland, the alliance’s only member without a standing army, occupies a half-dozen offices; France has a whole floor; Germany has two. The U.S. mission, with a staff of more than two hundred, representing a global force deployed in nearly a hundred and fifty countries, takes up an entire five-story wing.

One morning this spring, on an outdoor walkway that leads to what is known as the building’s Public Square, I passed a twisted knot of rusted steel, a remnant of the World Trade Center’s North Tower which was collected after the 2001 terrorist attacks. NATO dubbed the artifact the 9/11 and Article 5 Memorial, a testament to the sole instance in the alliance’s history in which its leaders have invoked the collective-defense clause in its founding charter. Article 5 is the core principle of the alliance, stating, “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” During the next two decades, twenty-nine non-U.S. NATO militaries deployed soldiers to Afghanistan, more than a thousand of whom died.

When the NATO building was officially unveiled, in 2017, Donald Trump, as the recently elected U.S. President, gave a dedication speech for the Article 5 memorial. During his Presidential campaign, he had seized on the fact that, though NATO members had committed to spending two per cent of their G.D.P. on defense, only five of them were hitting that target. Trump called the situation “unfair,” saying at one rally, “We’re protecting countries that most of the people in this room have never even heard of.” In Brussels, he gestured at “the commitments that bind us together as one,” but never explicitly endorsed Article 5. Privately, he expressed disapproval of the NATO building itself. John Bolton, who was then Trump’s national-security adviser, recalled the President once saying, “All this glass—one shot from a tank, the whole thing would collapse.”

In 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, NATO formally identified Russia as the “most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area.” In response, its members pledged hundreds of billions of dollars in additional defense spending and deployed tens of thousands of troops to what the alliance calls its eastern flank—countries near Russia’s borders. The U.S. alone moved twenty thousand additional soldiers to Europe. But Trump has often expressed a more complicated view of Russian aggression, at times even seeming to treat the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, more as a potential partner than as a threat. On the campaign trail last year, he suggested that, if a NATO ally underspent on defense, the U.S. would not provide military support in the case of a Russian attack. “I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want,” he said of Russia. “You don’t pay your bills, you get no protection. It’s very simple.”

Since returning to the Presidency, Trump has sought to dramatically rewrite the terms of America’s commitment to European security. He is now pushing for member states to spend five per cent of their G.D.P. on defense. In February, during a visit to NATO, his Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, said that European leaders “should take primary responsibility for defense of the Continent.” This spring, NBC News reported that the Trump Administration was preparing to move a sizable portion of American forces stationed in Europe to Asia and other regions, and that it might not fill the position of Supreme Allied Commander Europe, or SACEUR, NATO’s top military position, which has been held by an American since the founding of the alliance.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Prime Minister of Denmark, who was NATO’s secretary-general from 2009 to 2014, told me that the alliance is in an “existential moment,” on par with what it went through at the end of the Cold War. Only now, he said, “the tectonic plates moving beneath our feet are first and foremost in Washington, D.C.”

Trump’s chief interlocutor in NATO is its current secretary-general, Mark Rutte, who took up the job in October, after fourteen years as Prime Minister of the Netherlands. Rutte is fifty-eight, with rimless glasses, a sweeping side part, and a wide politician’s smile. He has long cultivated an image as a modest and hardworking public servant. Upon arriving in Brussels, he declined to live in the grand town house that has served as the secretary-general’s residence since the nineteen-eighties, preferring to stay in an apartment elsewhere in the city and use the official residence for meetings and receptions. Rutte’s relationship with Trump is informed by his instincts for cautious disagreement and diplomatic finesse. One of his advisers told me that the secretary-general believes his primary responsibility is to “keep the family together.” The U.S., the adviser went on, “is the member of the family we all need to stay safe.”

Rutte agreed to speak with me at the town house this spring, as he was preparing for a meeting with Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat. I joined him on a cream-colored couch in a sunny room facing a garden. A selection of cookies was set out; coffee was poured from a silver carafe. I asked Rutte how he planned to satisfy an American President who seems to scoff at the whole notion of collective security. Rutte was, as usual, in a chipper, buoyant mood. After a self-effacing take on his own job (“I always laugh to myself when anyone calls me secretary-general—that is a title usually reserved for Communist Parties”), he repeated a line he’s used many times, in various forms, during the past few months. Trump, he assured me, is “totally committed to NATO.”

The President, he went on, is merely saying something that Rutte himself has often told NATO’s member states: “If we want to stay safe from threats and adversaries like Putin or China or North Korea or Iran, then we have to spend more.” The pressure from Washington, Rutte said, is an “opportunity” for NATO members to build the defense capabilities they have neglected for decades. “There is a realization in Europe that we have to shift some of the burden between what the U.S. is doing and what Europeans can do more of themselves.”

In late June, Rutte will preside over a summit of NATO leaders in The Hague, his home town. The main subject will be new targets for defense spending, but European leaders hope the Americans will clarify their own commitments to the alliance. At the official residence, I told Rutte that many of them had expressed concerns about the speed and scale with which the Trump Administration might draw down forces in Europe. “We agreed with the White House that there will be no surprises,” he said. “We’ll do it in a structured way.” He added, “I’m not responsible for everyone’s anxieties. I can take them into account, but I’m not led by them.”

Still, Rutte has attempted to minimize the opportunity for drama at the summit—proceedings will be kept short, and the final communiqué, expressing an agreed-upon conclusion, will be limited to a few paragraphs. The narrow focus is Rutte’s way of acknowledging the world-altering stakes. “This will be one of the most consequential NATO summits since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” he said. “To use Trump’s language, ‘huge.’ ”

The idea of a defensive alliance linking the United States and Europe began to percolate in the aftermath of the Second World War. European cities had been destroyed, their populations scattered; entire economies were on the brink of collapse. Across the Atlantic Ocean, however, the United States had become Europe’s de-facto hegemon. In 1946, Winston Churchill spoke of the U.S. as being “at the pinnacle of world power,” a position that came with “an awe-inspiring accountability to the future.”

The following year, President Harry Truman outlined the principles of what would become known as the Truman Doctrine, calling on “the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” The Soviet Union, in the confusion and wreckage left by the war, was wasting little time installing client regimes in Eastern Europe. Truman hoped that, with U.S. military and economic support, a fractured and war-weary Continent could both achieve peace and hold off the Communists. General Hastings Ismay, Churchill’s chief military adviser during the war, who became NATO’s first secretary-general, is credited with a remark that captured the alliance’s initial goals: “Keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”