What will President Trump do about NATO in his second term in office? He has not actually expressly threatened to leave it, either in his first term as President or in the course of his his 2024 election campaign. However he has competing imperatives in the sphere of defence. He is committed to an increase in defence spending, but this is much needed in the United States as the United States military is now effectively operating in at least two major global theatres: Europe (in the course of the war in Ukraine) and the South China Sea (where there are various military stand-offs against China and North Korea). China has a far larger, more disciplined and better supplied and resourced army than does Russia, although it lacks combat experience: China is a relatively peaceful country that does not seek military conflict with its neighbours. Nevertheless China believes in preparing for it, which is why by some counts she has the largest standing army in the world and that is perceived as a challenge that the United States has to meet in kind by likewise having sufficiently many troops to counter that threat. The same goes with naval and airborne assets. The United States still has by far the world’s greatest capacity to project force at a distance, with eleven aircraft carriers in active service (China comes a poor second at three; the United Kingdom has two).
So Trump’s military advisors will be recommending that he focus a build-up of military forces that is inevitable to maintain the global balance of power and peace in a second Trump term in the East Asian theatre, and to seek to “hand off” responsibility for resourcing Europe’s military needs to Europe itself. After all, the population of the European Union in 2024 is around 450 million people and the population of NATO member states (excluding the United States) is 628 million. The United States is a country of 345 million, yet it accounts for 68% of NATO defence spending and that expenditure is used to keep Europe secure. Europe has not recently been secure, as the war in Ukraine has seen, and that is because NATO has undergone a fundamental fissure in leadership as between the United States and the other member states.
The European member states of NATO, some of which individually have quite significant military capabilities, have no forum within which to act under a joint command structure other than NATO and due to the United States’ dominance of NATO in terms of military personnel, financial contributions and military equipment, the European member states are unwilling or unprepared to take military action in response to the war in Ukraine. Even their efforts and commitments to supply Ukraine with weapons have been half-hearted: a lot of those weapons never reach Ukraine or (worse) never reach the front line; their logistics and supply chains are not managed adequately, and neither is the supply of ammunition and training support. The same can be said of American weapons, incidentally; US arms manufacturers have been keener to supply foreign orders for their equipment than US government orders for shipment to Ukraine, presumably on price grounds, and the US has not taken the command economy approach to its defence industry necessary to fight a war in Ukraine which is what it is really doing by proxy. Moreover the US arms industry is prioritising South China Sea orders over those destined for Ukraine, because that is what the US government is focused upon.
The net result is that the US Government has not engaged with the war in Ukraine sufficiently in either a military or a diplomatic sense since February 2022. You either have to fight a war properly or you have to negotiate a solution to it and the United States has done neither. President-elect Trump now finds himself in an invidious position in that the war is in a stalemate in Ukraine, but with the dilapidated Russian Armed Forces in a stalemate with the Ukrainian Armed Forces, possibly the world’s most enormous militia structure that will need to be massive reformed if it is meet NATO standards as an aspirant NATO member state. Now the second President Trump may negotiate that away with a promise to Vladimir Putin as part of a peace deal that Ukraine will not join NATO and an armistice along the existing approximate front line (give or take various negotiated pieces of territory) but I doubt it. That is because President Trump’s vision is for NATO in Europe to expand and to take primary dominance for Europe’s own security against Russia, thereby freeing up more resources for the United States to prepare for potential battles - or at least stand-offs - in the South China Sea region. The United States may also need to help Israel go to war with Iran, which will take at least two aircraft carrier strike fleets. We will see.
Hence I consider it more likely that President Trump will insist upon Ukraine’s membership of NATO as a precondition of a peace agreement with Russia because that will boost NATO’s armed forces by a substantial number of experienced battle-hardened soldiers who will then need to be trained in NATO’s ways. In this way, and by encouraging greater European ownership of NATO both financially and in terms of the command structure, America can remain a member of NATO but playing less of a “world policeman” role, a position it has periodically recoiled from in twentieth century history (consider the inter-war period in particular) and that it is, if not recoiling from now, redistributing its focus towards China and the Middle East and asking European countries to hold the fort with Vladimir Putin. That is why European countries must increase their defence spending dramatically, under the NATO umbrella that the United States will remain part of, promptly. The Wales agreement of 2014 whereby all NATO member states would increase defence spending to a minimum of 2 per cent of GDP has been observed by most large member states (and virtually all the small ones) but not by some and the failures are remarkable, as the following graph shows:
President Trump has infamously threatened to let Vladimir Putin do whatever he wants to countries that don’t spend their committed GDP allotments on NATO but the serious point behind this quip is that countries who are not putting in their fare share of what is due might be questioned as to their entitlement to the protection of the United States and the other members of NATO in the event of an attack. It is not surprising, looking at the graph, that the states who contribute the largest proportion of their GDP to defence are those in closer proximity to Russia but in reality the 2% threshold will have to rise across Europe as Europe re-militarises to accommodate the American partial pivot towards Asian interests. The United States no longer has a larger GDP than the rest of the world combined, as it did at the end of World War II, and the world is inevitably to an extent more multi-polar than it was at the time the North Atlantic Treaty was put into force, and this requires a rewriting of some of the mathematics about donor contributions. The United States is the largest economy in NATO and contributes one of the highest proportions of its GDP to defence; a reconsideration of this anomaly is inevitable as the major European military powers - the United Kingdom, France, Germany and now Poland (Spain and Italy both fall way behind in the chart) must step up military expenditures. Moreover a regime of sanctions for non-spending NATO members might be brought into force: suspension of Article 5 (the obligation of collective defence) where a NATO member state falls below an agreed threshold of expenditure on defence.
President Trump has promised to bring the war in Ukraine to an end within 24 hours and he may well achieve something like that; we will have some bloody fighting in the meantime with the Ukrainians and Russians scrambling over every last village, field and piece of forest in the final winter thrusts for territory before the new US administration imposes a peace, of whatever terms, upon them. But as a price he extracts for doing that he is likely to demand significant structural and financial reforms in NATO so that the United States can now turn its still substantial but in relative terms diminished military resources towards Asia and the Middle East, where it sees equally existential threats as the Russian Federation. After all, Russia is just a war-mongerer with a depleted economy that will remain crippled by sanctions and her preposterous system of government will eventually collapse; China is a global economic superpower and may turn into a military superpower as well. If that happens then the United States will be concerned that the South China Sea does not become a military ignition point and that the status quo of the United States and her allies is preserved, all at the same time as a trade war - or at the very least difficult trade negotiations - will be constantly underway.