NATO Chief Warns They Can’t Count on Trump’s U.S. Anymore
Western alliances are turning away from America.NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte told reporters at a press conference in Ankara, Turkey, on Monday that NATO’s traditional reliance on the U.S. is no longer a sustainable model for the military and economic coalition.“What you are seeing is a NATO which indeed is changing in a transformational sense,” Rutte said. “I would argue that the NATO we had only three or four, five years ago was not sustainable.“It is not sustainable that we ask a country with 350 million people, living eight hours flying from here, to defend against the Russians with 600 million people living in this part of NATO territory—the richest part of the world—being so overly dependent on the United States,” Rutte continued.“So, rebalancing that—the United States still providing nuclear, the United States still providing crucial conventional support to NATO as a whole and therefore to the transatlantic security, and therefore of course also to their own security—rebalancing that is crucial. “And therefore a stronger European role, Canada also stepping up, is important, because all of us—the alliance, to be honest—would long-term probably not have been sustainable,” Rutte said. “Stronger Europe, stronger NATO.”Canada has made generational investments in its defense spending over the last year, and is reportedly on course to meet NATO’s next commitment: using 5 percent of its gross domestic product for defense spending by 2035, according to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.Carney has made a point to publicly criticize Donald Trump and his apparent disinterest in being the leader of the free world. Earlier this year, Carney delivered a scathing address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in which he marked the finale of Pax Americana and the reorganization of global power.“The middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” Carney said at the time.Leaders from NATO member states, including Trump, are meeting in Turkey this week in what foreign policy experts anticipate will be one of the tensest summits yet. Late last week, Trump claimed that the NATO alliance had become “one-sided,” and that the U.S. “didn’t need anything” from the Cold War–era coalition. In a Truth Social post on Thursday, Trump referred to America’s involvement in NATO as “ridiculous” and claimed that “they were not there for us!!!”But that’s not true. Despite Trump’s rhetoric, there has only ever been one time in history in which NATO’s Article 5 has been invoked: the global mobilization to support America in its military offensive against Afghanistan after 9/11.Nonetheless, Americans don’t seem to believe that the country’s long-standing European allies would support the U.S. if it were attacked. A Politico survey of more than 31,000 respondents, published Friday, found that just 43 percent of U.S. adults believed that the alliance would assist their home country if it were attacked. That was the lowest score out of any of NATO’s 32 member states when asked the same question.The U.S. president has been on the offensive against NATO since the early days of his first term in office. He regularly threatens to remove America from the coalition, and has been remarkably cavalier at times about the organization’s potential dissolution. He has also baselessly insisted that other NATO members have failed to pay their dues to the entity and shortchanged the U.S. in the process, even though that’s not how the alliance operates.It is unclear who in the Western world benefits from the dissolution of NATO. John Bolton, Trump’s first-term national security adviser and a policy hawk who also served under Ronald Reagan, has said that the consequences of exiting the alliance could be dire.