Trump’s Shadow Hangs Over NATO
A year since Trump entered office, European allies are relieved the alliance is still standing, but U.S. leadership remains in doubt.
When generals and diplomats gather for Europe’s most important security conference in Munich next month, President Donald Trump will not be in the room. But the U.S. president will cast a long shadow over the annual event, as his provocative comments about the NATO alliance have shaken the confidence of America’s partners across the Atlantic.
Doubts about Washington’s leadership of NATO are expected to dominate the Feb. 16-18 Munich Security Conference, with European strategists weighing what to make of the contradictory messages coming from the White House.
Immediately after Trump’s election in November 2016, European governments braced for a nightmare scenario, fearing the “America First” president would make good on his talk of cozying up to Russia and abandoning NATO’s central tenet of collective defense. But more than a year later, their worst fears have yet to be realized.
Even as Trump’s words roiled the waters, the NATO alliance is still standing. Below the surface, U.S. military brass and Trump’s deputies are working with their European counterparts to try to deter Russia, current and former U.S. and European officials say.
Despite his rhetoric, Trump’s administration has taken concrete steps to bolster the alliance and counter Moscow, approving weapons sales to help Ukraine take on pro-Russian separatists and deploying more American tanks to NATO’s eastern flank.
For NATO allies, the money, the military hardware, and the drills are all reassuring. But an alliance is not just about weapons and budgets. And the president’s tone and words have planted serious doubts about whether the United States will deliver in a crisis, Western officials say.
“We still work well with our American counterparts inside NATO,” one senior European military officer told Foreign Policy. “But when these things are said, it’s a problem. It creates this uncertainty.”
For European allies, their view is that “it isn’t as bad as we thought it would be,” said Julianne Smith, who served as deputy national security advisor to former Vice President Joe Biden.
But she added: “While some allies are breathing a sigh of relief, there’s still some heartburn or, at the very least, some uncertainty about where we’re going.”
The Europeans are pinning their hopes on more than six decades of close military ties. And they are looking to Trump’s team, including Defense Secretary James Mattis and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, to serve as guardians of the alliance.
At a Jan. 15 ceremony in Brussels where German officials presented a medal to Dunford, that message came through loud and clear, though no one uttered Trump’s name.