SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — Donald Trump may not have been on the NATO summit agenda, but he was clearly on the minds of NATO leaders who gathered in Washington this week – given his lead in the polls, his long-running criticism of the alliance, and his deep skepticism towards aid for Ukraine.
According to multiple reports, leaders of many NATO nations have reached out to Trump campaign officials, well aware of the fallout of President Joe Biden’s poor showing in the June 27 debate and the calls from some quarters for him to get out of the race. Meanwhile, NATO itself is preparing what some have called “Trump-proofing” plans in the event that Trump returns to the White House.
“Of course they have reason to worry,” former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor told The Cipher Brief. “It’s not just Europeans. Americans are worried as well. There are concerns that the strong support for Ukraine and the strong support for NATO – and therefore the strong support for European security – could be challenged.”
For NATO, “it's extremely fragile if Donald Trump comes back in as president because he's been so overt both in his skepticism and criticality and negativity about the alliance, but also his seeming affection toward (Russian President) Vladimir Putin,” James Stavridis, a former top NATO Commander and Cipher Brief expert, told MSNBC as the summit opened. “I don't think there's been a moment previously where you could talk about that transatlantic bridge breaking. It’s creaked a little bit from time to time. I've never been more worried about it.”
But while NATO leaders contemplate what a second Trump term might mean for their countries and the alliance writ large, experts are divided as to just how worried they should be.
“The West Europeans freak out about Donald Trump,” said Kurt Volker, a Cipher Brief expert and former U.S. Ambassador to NATO. “They don’t like him as a person…They don’t like his vulgarity. They don’t like the threats that he makes about not supporting NATO allies. You name it, they have anxieties about Donald Trump and they express them constantly.”
But Volker and others said some of the concerns may be overblown. “My advice to my West European friends is always, ‘Don’t make any assumptions. You don’t know what the policies are going to be’,” Volker said.
“If you are concerned, what are you doing?” asked Nico Lange, a former chief of staff at the German Ministry of Defense. In an interview with The Cipher Brief, Lange said NATO nations ought to boost their collective defense, no matter what happens on election day in the U.S.
“We have to provide for our own security more, regardless of who will be president of the United States,” Lange said. “The Americans will elect whoever they will elect, and we have to find a way to work together with the United States of America.”
Trump and NATO: What we know
While the NATO leaders were meeting in Washington, the former president was showing his disdain for the alliance.
“I didn’t know what the hell NATO was too much before,” Trump told a campaign rally in Doral, Florida. “But it didn’t take me long to figure it out, like about two minutes. And the first thing I figured out was they were not paying. We were paying, we were paying almost fully for NATO. And I said that’s unfair.”
He then repeated a story he first told in February, claiming that during his administration he had warned NATO members that he would not defend them unless they increased their own military spending. “I said, ‘No, I will not protect you from Russia.’” In the initial telling, Trump said he would “encourage” Russia and China to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO nations that fail to “pay your bills.”
Stavridis said this was the story that “sticks in the Europeans’ mind, that he may decide to let Russia do whatever the hell it wants to. Those are very chilling comments to our European colleagues.”
Like much of what Donald Trump says, his statements about NATO have been a jumble, making it difficult to distinguish bluster from actual plans or policy. Trump declared NATO “obsolete” in a 2017 interview, and said the alliance had failed to defend against acts of terrorism. In the same interview, however, he said NATO “is still very important to me.”
Trump has threatened repeatedly to pull the U.S. out of NATO, both as a candidate for president and during his four years in office, and he has blasted other member nations for failing to pay their “fair share.”
"NATO has to treat the U.S. fairly, because if it's not for the United States, NATO literally doesn't even exist," Trump said in March. "The United States should pay its fair share, not everybody else's fair share," he said, adding that NATO mattered less to Americans. "We have a nice big, beautiful ocean" between the U.S. and Europe, he said.
Some of Trump’s supporters have pushed back against the warnings, saying the former president is motivated only by the “fair share” point, and not any animus towards NATO itself.
Pete Hoekstra, who served as President Trump’s Ambassador to the Netherlands, told CNN this week that “Trump was never against NATO,” but “against a NATO that the Europeans didn’t support.”
Trump wasn’t the first president to raise the issue of NATO members’ defense spending. In 2014, under pressure from the Obama Administration, NATO agreed that within the decade, all its members would spend a minimum of 2% of GDP on defense. Now that deadline has come, and this week the White House noted that 23 of NATO’s 32 are expected to meet or exceed the 2% target in 2024, compared with just 9 when Trump left office. That is true, though many note that the increases were largely a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
More worrisome for many NATO nations is what Trump has said about the war. He has been fiercely critical of the large-scale aid packages for Ukraine and said often – most recently in the June 27 debate with Biden – that Vladimir Putin would never have invaded Ukraine on his watch, and that he (Trump) would end the war immediately after his election.
That claim has raised fears across the NATO alliance – and of course in Ukraine itself – that Trump would accept a deal that cedes territory to the Russians that it has captured and held since the February 2022 invasion.
As Volker said, Ukraine and its neighbors fear that Trump’s plans would amount to “just pulling the rug out from under Ukraine, telling them to give up territory, telling them that we’re not going to support them anymore.”
Trump-proofing NATO?
This week Mark Hannah, a senior fellow at the Institute for Global Affairs, wrote a piece for U.S. News under the headline, “Here’s how Biden could Trump-proof NATO.”
“Trump-proof” – it’s a phrase that’s catching on, shorthand for measures NATO can take that would inoculate the alliance against a Trump victory on November 5.
Hannah’s prescription echoed Trump’s own calls for more European defense spending. He cited an Institute for Global Affairs survey which showed that “ordinary Europeans want to be even less dependent on U.S. protection; majorities in the UK, France and Germany want Europe to be primarily responsible for (their) own security.” The concept, at least, is simple; if NATO’s European members surge their defense spending (they have done so already this year, by a 19% margin, according to an analysis by the International Institute for Strategic Studies), then a Trump victory would do less damage to the alliance.
Meanwhile, on the eve of this week’s summit, the Wall Street Journal reported on “Trump-proofing” measures that are already underway.
NATO has agreed to station a senior civilian official in Kyiv and establish a command post in Wiesbaden, Germany to coordinate military aid and training for Ukraine. The Journal reported that the Wiesbaden operation will be staffed by 70 NATO personnel who will effectively replace what had been a U.S.-only operation. The plan has a name – NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine – and a mission to better integrate NATO with aid and training efforts that have been run by the U.S.
“NATO is the natural place to coordinate assistance to ensure Ukraine is more capable of defending itself now and in the future,” a senior State Department official told the Journal.
The unstated goal: to put an arrangement in place that won’t be damaged if a different American administration chooses to retreat from NATO.
“A big reason for the change is to Trump-proof the assistance effort to Ukraine,” Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, told the Journal. “Rather than having Washington in charge of managing the training and assistance, NATO will be in charge. So even if the U.S. reduces or withdraws support for the effort, it won’t be eliminated.”
Another former U.S. envoy to NATO, Douglas Lute, who is also a Cipher Brief expert, said the plan will “provide for durability in the face of potential national political changes, whether it is as the result of elections in the United States, France, the U.K. or even in the European Union.”
Last December, the U.S. Congress took its own “Trump-proofing” action. It passed a bill barring the president from unilaterally withdrawing the U.S. from NATO without Senate approval, or an Act of Congress.
A message for the Europeans: Calm down
Ambassador Volker isn’t alone in thinking that the European concerns are exaggerated – and that no matter the November results, NATO’s European members would be smart to spend less time worrying about Trump, and more energy and money on beefing up their defenses.
“What does ‘Trump-proofing’ mean?” Lange, the former German Defense Ministry official, asked. “Does it mean to work together with any U.S. administration, which is in our interest? Or does it mean to do something else, if somebody some of us don’t like becomes president of the United States?”
The better approach for Germany and other European members of NATO, Lange said, would be to agree to permanently spend more than 2 % on defense, and encourage other nations in Europe to do the same.
At least one NATO leader said as much this week.
“All of us have to step up, to scale up,” Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark, a NATO member, said at a Council on Foreign Relations event Tuesday.
She said NATO nations had been “too naïve” about threats from Russia and China, adding that she agreed with the calls to boost military spending across the alliance.
Even Stavridis, for all his concerns about NATO in a second Trump term, said that “the silver lining may be that the Europeans will therefore spend more on their own defense, which they need to do. And if so, there is every opportunity that this alliance will emerge even stronger.”
Others warned that "Trump-proofing" NATO will involve much more than European military budgets and political will.
“If an American president comes into office and says, ‘We’re done with that,’ there is definitely will in Europe to backfill the American role,” John Deni, a senior fellow on security at the Atlantic Council, told the Associated Press. “The Brits would jump on it.”
But Deni questioned any European nation’s ability to match the “capacity or the capability…and speed and the scale” of the U.S. military.
“This notion that we are somehow Trump-proofing or future-proofing the American commitment — either to Ukraine or to NATO — I think that mostly is fantasy.”
Biden’s NATO argument
Not long ago it would have been hard to imagine a NATO summit having any impact in a U.S. presidential campaign – especially when polls regularly show economic issues at the top of American voters’ list of concerns. But this is no ordinary presidential campaign, and in the last few weeks, at least two things have changed: the June 27 debate, which put a glaring spotlight on Biden’s public performance at the summit; and the White House argument – made repeatedly during the past week – that NATO and other U.S. alliances will be in peril should Trump retake the presidency.
“Who’s going to be able to hold NATO together like me?” Biden asked ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in an interview last Friday. And in an op-ed Tuesday, Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan appeared to be addressing Trump and other critics of the alliance.
“When President Biden took office in 2021, our alliances around the world were atrophied and underutilized,” Sullivan wrote. “Now, three and a half years later, our allies are committing more to our common defense than at any point since the end of the Cold War.”
In a thinly-veiled shot at Trump, Sullivan said the shift had come because “the president knew that we could persuade our allies and partners to do more — and spend more — if we strengthened and deepened ties instead of bullying them or threatening to leave the alliance.”
A “Trump-proof” leader for NATO?
Whoever wins in November will have a new interlocutor at NATO headquarters. And here, some see a different kind of “Trump-proofing” for the alliance.
Mark Rutte takes over as NATO Secretary General on October 1, after more than a decade as Prime Minister of the Netherlands. Rutte is an avid student of American politics who won President Biden’s strong support when he was a candidate for the job, and praise from then-President Trump when they met in the Oval Office. “I like this guy!” Trump gushed after the meeting.
In the Netherlands, Rutte is widely known as an effective conciliator and architect of compromise. This week Robert De Groot, a former Dutch ambassador to the EU, told The New York Times: “If he can’t bridge a new U.S. administration with Europe, I don’t think anyone can.”
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