THE END OF NATO?
- Paul Hansbury
- Apr 7
- 10 min read
'Hallelujah. Never again will your fates be tossed around like poker chips on a bargaining table.' So said US Secretary of State Madeline Albright in 1999 to the leaders of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland as their states joined NATO. It was an exciting time. And yet the fate of all of America's European allies is now being tossed about casually by the incumbent in the White House.
Trump, on social media last Tuesday, effectively announced the end of US involvement in NATO. He told allies: 'You'll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won't be there to help you anymore, just like you weren't there for us.' He was lambasting them for not sending support to open the Strait of Hormuz. His Secretary of State Marco Rubio weighed in, calling the alliance 'not a very good arrangement.'
Then Trump was expected to trounce the alliance in a speech late last Wednesday. I wondered if the scheduled timing, 3am Central European Time, was a deliberate ploy to ensure Europeans were fast asleep at the time of a major policy announcement. One could be forgiven for thinking he was about to state officially that he wishes to begin the process of quitting the alliance. In fact someone seems to have talked him out of it. Or he never had anything so significant planned. In any case he did not mention NATO in his twenty-minute speech.
For sure, much of Trump's rhetoric is 'noise', most of which is best ignored and not worth getting exercised about. But here in Europe we should not dismiss his threat to withdraw from an alliance that he has berated constantly, from calling it 'obsolete' in 2016 to his repeated claims that European allies 'do nothing' for America, to the manner in which he talks of it as something separate from the US that only makes demands on Washington and gives nothing in return.
We need to acknowledge that it is the US's prerogative to leave the alliance. It is therefore vital that Europe prepares for the possibility; it should not rely on the hope that such a decision would not gain the necessary two-thirds majority in a Congressional vote to become reality. Trump spares little to get his way, after all. This (long) post recounts the post-cold war history of NATO and indicates three policies Europeans should prepare to adopt now.
'Out of area or out of business'
The North Atlantic Treaty, signed in 1949, aimed to deter the Soviet Union from attacking western Europe. In essence, the United States committed itself to Europe's defence. With the end of the cold war three decades later, the demise of the Soviet Union, and a diminished threat from Russia, the alliance could have been disbanded. Many Americans wanted to disengage from Europe and withdraw US troops. But President George H. W. Bush believed that the US benefitted from maintaining a military presence on European soil. He understood that even in the absence of a Soviet threat, missile defences on the continent could aid America's defence against a Middle Eastern foe.
After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the decision that a unified Germany would be a member of NATO, which the Americans negotiated hard for in the first months of 1990, was in effect America's way of saying it remained committed to Europe. In the negotiations about Germany, the US negotiators wanted to ensure that the 400,000 Soviet troops stationed in eastern Germany would leave, whilst American troops in western Germany should remain. Persuading the Soviet leaders that Germany anchored in NATO was preferable to an unaligned unified Germany, the US Secretary of State James Baker agreed that the territory of the former East Germany would have a 'special military status' but nonetheless be inside NATO.
