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2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

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Former President Donald J. Trump has made it clear that he primarily sees NATO
as a drain on American resources.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
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FEARS OF A NATO WITHDRAWAL RISE AS TRUMP SEEKS A RETURN TO POWER

Current and former European diplomats said there was growing concern a second
Trump presidency could mean an American retreat from the continent and a gutting
of NATO.

Former President Donald J. Trump has made it clear that he primarily sees NATO
as a drain on American resources.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

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By Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman

 * Dec. 9, 2023

For 74 years, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been America’s most
important military alliance. Presidents of both parties have seen NATO as a
force multiplier enhancing the influence of the United States by uniting
countries on both sides of the Atlantic in a vow to defend one another.

Donald J. Trump has made it clear that he sees NATO as a drain on American
resources by freeloaders. He has held that view for at least a quarter of a
century.

In his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” Mr. Trump wrote that “pulling back
from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually.” As president,
he repeatedly threatened a United States withdrawal from the alliance.

Yet as he runs to regain the White House, Mr. Trump has said precious little
about his intentions. His campaign website contains a single cryptic sentence:
“We have to finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally
re-evaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.” He and his team refuse to
elaborate.




That vague line has generated enormous uncertainty and anxiety among European
allies and American supporters of the country’s traditional foreign-policy role.

European ambassadors and think tank officials have been making pilgrimages to
associates of Mr. Trump to inquire about his intentions. At least one
ambassador, Finland’s Mikko Hautala, has reached out directly to Mr. Trump and
sought to persuade him of his country’s value to NATO as a new member, according
to two people familiar with the conversations.

In interviews over the past several months, more than a half-dozen current and
former European diplomats — speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of
retribution from Mr. Trump should he win — said alarm was rising on Embassy Row
and among their home governments that Mr. Trump’s return could mean not just the
abandonment of Ukraine, but a broader American retreat from the continent and a
gutting of the Atlantic alliance.

“There is great fear in Europe that a second Trump presidency would result in an
actual pullout of the United States from NATO,” said James G. Stavridis, a
retired four-star Navy admiral who was NATO’s supreme allied commander from 2009
to 2013. “That would be an enormous strategic and historic failure on the part
of our nation.”




Formed after World War II to keep the peace in Europe and act as a bulwark
against the Soviet Union, NATO evolved into an instrument through which the U.S.
works with allies on military issues around the world. Its original purpose —
the heart of which is the collective-defense provision, known as Article V, that
states that an armed attack on any member “shall be considered an attack against
them all” — lives on, especially for newer members like Poland and the Baltic
States that were once dominated by the Soviet Union and continue to fear Russia.


Image
Ukrainian soldiers test-fired the guns of tanks provided by NATO before moving
to the frontline in Ukraine. NATO’s purpose as a bulwark against the Soviet
Union lives on for newer members in Eastern Europe who continue to fear Russian
aggression.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times


The interviews with current and former diplomats revealed that European
officials were mostly out of ideas for how to deal with Mr. Trump other than
returning to a previous playbook of flattery and transactional tributes.

Smaller countries that are more vulnerable to Russian attacks are expected to
try to buy their way into Mr. Trump’s good graces by increasing their orders of
American weapons or — as Poland did during his term — by performing grand acts
of adulation, including offering to name a military base Fort Trump in return
for his placing a permanent presence there.

At this point in the campaign, Mr. Trump is focused on the criminal cases
against him and on defeating his Republican primary rivals, and he rarely talks
about the alliance, even in private.

As he maintains a broad lead in his campaign to become the Republican nominee,
the implications for America’s oldest and most critical military alliance are
not clearly advertised plans from Mr. Trump, but a turmoil of widely held
suspicions charged with unknowability.





UKRAINE

Amid those swirling doubts, one thing is likely: The first area where Mr.
Trump’s potential return to the White House in 2025 could provoke a foreign
policy crisis is for Ukraine and the alliance of Western democracies that have
been supporting its defense against Russia’s invasion.

Helping Ukraine stave off the attempted Russian conquest has become a defining
NATO effort. Ukraine is not a NATO member but has remained an independent
country because of NATO support.

Camille Grand, who was NATO’s assistant secretary general for defense investment
early in the war, said that how Mr. Trump handled Ukraine would be the first
“big test case” that Europeans would use to assess how reliable an ally — or not
— he might be in a second term.



“Will he throw Zelensky under the bus in the first three months of his term?”
Mr. Grand, now at the European Council on Foreign Relations, asked, referring to
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.


Image

NATO’s collective response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has helped President
Biden, center, rebuild traditional alliances after the turmoil of Mr. Trump’s
presidency.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times



Mr. Trump has repeatedly declared that he would somehow settle the war “in 24
hours.” He has not said how, but he has coupled that claim with suggestions that
he could have prevented the war by making a deal in which Ukraine simply ceded
to Russia its eastern lands that President Vladimir Putin has illegally seized.

Mr. Zelensky has said Ukraine would never agree to cede any of its lands to
Russia as part of a peace deal. But Mr. Trump would have tremendous leverage
over Ukraine’s government. The United States has supplied huge quantities of
vital weapons, ammunition and intelligence to Ukraine. European countries have
pledged the most economic assistance to Ukraine but could not make up the
shortfall if America stopped sending military aid.

Some of Mr. Trump’s congressional allies, who have followed his lead in
preaching an “America First” mantra, already oppose sending further military
assistance to Kyiv. And in a broader sign of waning support, Senate Republicans
last week blocked an emergency spending bill to further fund the war in Ukraine
after demanding unrelated immigration policy concessions from Democrats as a
condition of passing it.

But even if Congress appropriates further aid, Mr. Trump could withhold delivery
of it — as he did in 2019 when trying to coerce Mr. Zelensky into announcing a
criminal investigation into Mr. Biden, the abuse-of-power scandal that led to
Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.

Against that backdrop, Russia’s battlefield strategy for now appears to be
biding its time; it is carrying out attacks when it sees opportunities and to
tie up Ukrainian forces but is not making paradigm-shifting moves or
negotiating, officials said. That stasis raises the possibility that Mr. Putin
has calculated he could be in a much better position after the 2024 U.S.
election.





‘EVERYBODY OWES US MONEY’

Mr. Trump likes to brag that he privately told leaders of NATO countries that if
Russia attacked them and they had not paid the money they owed to NATO and to
the United States, he would not defend them. He claimed at a rally in October
that after he had declared that “everybody owes us money” and was “delinquent,”
he made that threat at a meeting and so “hundreds of billions of dollars came
flowing in.”

That story is garbled at best.

There was a spending-related dispute, but it was over Europeans’ meeting their
spending commitments to their own militaries, not money they somehow owed to
NATO or to the United States. They did increase military spending during the
Trump administration — though by nowhere near the amounts Mr. Trump has claimed.
And their spending rose significantly more in 2023, in response to Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine.

But Mr. Trump’s exuberance for retelling his story, coupled with his past
displeasure with NATO, is giving fresh alarm to NATO supporters.

Pressed by The New York Times to explain what he means by “fundamentally
re-evaluating” NATO’s mission and purpose, Mr. Trump provided a rambling
statement that contained no clear answer but expressed skepticism about
alliances.

“It is the obligation of every U.S. president to ensure that America’s alliances
serve to protect the American people, and do not recklessly endanger American
blood and treasure,” Mr. Trump’s statement read.




Some Trump supporters who are pro-NATO have argued that Mr. Trump is bluffing.
They said he was merely looking to put more pressure on the Europeans to spend
more on their own defense.

“He’s not going to do that,” Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican
and a Trump supporter, said of the prospect of Mr. Trump’s withdrawing from
NATO. “But what he will do is, he will make people pay more, and I think that
will be welcome news to a lot of folks.”

Robert O’Brien, who served as Mr. Trump’s final national security adviser,
echoed that view.

“President Trump withdrawing from NATO is an issue that some people in D.C.
discuss, but I don’t believe it’s a real thing,” Mr. O’Brien said. “He
understands the military value of the alliance to America, but he just feels —
correctly, I might add — like we’re getting played by the Germans and other
nations that refuse to pay their fair share for their own defense.”

But John Bolton, a conservative hawk who served as national security adviser
from 2018 to 2019, wrote in his memoir that Mr. Trump had to be repeatedly
talked out of withdrawing from NATO. In an interview, Mr. Bolton said “there is
no doubt in my mind” that in a second term, Mr. Trump would withdraw the United
States from NATO.


Image

Germany has increased its defense spending but will still fall short of the 2
percent target European members of the alliance agreed to.Credit...Laetitia
Vancon for The New York Times



As a legal matter, whether Mr. Trump could unilaterally withdraw the United
States from NATO is likely to be contested.

The Constitution requires Senate consent to ratify a treaty but omits procedures
to annul one. This has led to debate about whether presidents can do so on their
own or need lawmakers’ authorization. There are only a few court precedents
regarding the issue, none definitive.

Decisions to revoke treaties by President Jimmy Carter in 1978 and by President
George W. Bush in 2001 led members of Congress to file lawsuits that were
rejected by courts, partly on the grounds that the disputes were a “political
question” for the elected branches to work out. While the legal precedents are
not perfectly clear, both of those presidents effectively won: the treaties are
widely understood to be void. Still, any attempt to withdraw from NATO would
likely invite a broader challenge.

In reaction to Mr. Trump’s threats, some lawmakers — led by Senator Tim Kaine,
Democrat of Virginia, and Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida — put a
provision in the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which Congress is
likely to vote on this month. It says the president shall not withdraw the
United States from NATO without congressional approval. But whether the
Constitution permits such a tying of a president’s hands is also contestable.

And European diplomats say that even if Mr. Trump were to nominally keep the
United States in NATO, they fear that he could so undermine trust in the United
States’ reliability to live up to the collective-defense provision that its
value as a deterrent to Russia would be lost.





A TRANSACTIONAL ATTITUDE

The uncertainty stemming from Mr. Trump’s maximalist and yet vague rhetoric is
bound up in his past displays of consistent skepticism about NATO and of unusual
solicitude to Russia.

As a candidate in 2016, Mr. Trump rattled NATO allies by saying that if Russia
attacked the Baltic States, he would decide whether to come to their aid only
after reviewing whether they had “fulfilled their obligations to us.” He also
repeatedly praised Mr. Putin and said he would consider recognizing Russia’s
illegal annexation of Crimea.

As president in July 2018, Mr. Trump not only nearly withdrew from NATO at an
alliance summit but denounced the European Union as a “foe” because of “what
they do to us in trade.” He then attended a summit with Mr. Putin, after which
he expressed skepticism about the idea that the United States should go to war
to defend a tiny NATO ally, Montenegro.


Image

Mr. Trump held a summit in Helsinki with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia
in 2018 after repeatedly praising him and displaying an unusual solicitude
toward Russia.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times


With no prior experience in the military or government, Mr. Trump brought a
transactional, mercantilist attitude to interactions with allies. He tended to
base his views of foreign nations on his personal relationships with their
leaders and on trade imbalances.




Mr. Trump particularly disliked Angela Merkel, the former German chancellor, and
often complained that German automakers were flooding America with their
products. His defenders say his anger was in some ways justified: Germany hadn’t
been meeting its military spending commitments, and over his objections, Ms.
Merkel pushed ahead with a natural-gas pipeline to Russia. Germany only
suspended that project two days before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Mr. Trump’s allies also point out that he approved sending antitank weapons to
Ukraine, which President Obama had not done after Russia seized Crimea in 2014.

Still, in 2020, Mr. Trump decided to withdraw a third of the 36,000 American
troops stationed in Germany. Some were to come home, as he preferred, with
others redeployed elsewhere in Europe. But the following year, as Russia built
up troops on Ukraine’s border, Mr. Biden canceled the decision and added troops
in Germany as a show of support for NATO.


A SUPPORTIVE MOVEMENT

If he returns to power, Mr. Trump will be backed by a conservative movement that
has become more skeptical of allies and of U.S. involvement abroad.

Anti-interventionist foreign policy institutes are more organized and better
funded than they were during Mr. Trump’s time in office. Those groups include
the Center for Renewing America, a Trump-aligned think tank that published a
paper titled “Pivoting the U.S. Away From Europe to a Dormant NATO,” which
provides a rationale for minimizing America’s role in NATO.




On Nov. 1, the Heritage Foundation — a traditionally hawkish conservative think
tank that has lately refashioned itself in a Trumpist mold, on matters including
opposition to aid to Ukraine — hosted a delegation from the European Council on
Foreign Relations.

The Europeans exchanged views with ardent nationalists, including Michael Anton,
a National Security Council official in the Trump administration; Dan Caldwell,
who managed foreign policy at the Center for Renewing America; and national
security aides to Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio and other Trump-aligned senators.

According to two people who attended, Mr. Anton told the Europeans he could
imagine Mr. Trump setting an ultimatum: If NATO members did not sufficiently
increase their military spending by a deadline, he would withdraw the United
States from the alliance. As the meeting broke up, Eckart von Klaeden, a former
German politician who is now a Mercedes-Benz Group executive, implored Mr. Anton
to ask Mr. Trump to please talk to America’s European allies as he formulated
his foreign policy.

That seems like wishful thinking.

In his statement to The Times, Mr. Trump invoked his slogan “America First” — a
phrase once popularized by American isolationists opposed to getting involved in
World War II.

“My highest priority,” Mr. Trump said in the statement, “has always been, and
will remain, to America first — the defense of our own country, our own borders,
our own values, and our own people, including their jobs and well-being.”

Steven Erlanger and Mark Landler contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett
contributed research.



Jonathan Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election
and Donald Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan

Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy. He has been a
journalist for more than two decades. More about Charlie Savage

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024
presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the
investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman

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