Trump is saying this now because he's angry that other NATO members aren't doing what he wants. But there are also medium- and longer-term questions about NATO's viability that everyone needs to face up to. 🧵
The US president blithely rehearsing what Putin thinks of NATO, and Putin being sufficiently relaxed with/contemptuous of the US president to tell him, is pretty strong evidence that NATO is not currently functioning as a defensive alliance in any meaningful way.
NATO is facing short, medium, and long term crises relating to the US's presence in a collective security alliance with Europe. The short term crisis is a result of Trump having to confront the reality that NATO isn't, as he's always thought, a protection racket in which he can simply strong-arm the other members. (The kind of OTT flattery that Mark Rutte has engaged in probably hasn't helped with this.) The medium term NATO crisis is that the Trump administration - Trump himself and many of those around him - don't value NATO, are ideologically hostile to Europe, and seem to prefer an alignment with the Kremlin. This, of course, is the crisis that's doing the most severe damage to the alliance. It's why they have, for months,talked about NATO as if the US isn't part of it. It's why the allegedly US "peace" plan for Ukraine had the US as a mediator between NATO and Russia.
It would be catastrophically unwise for the rest of NATO to treat the US as a meaningful collective security partner while the Trump administration is in office. It's a nightmare scenario for Europe but it's where we are, as Europeans have increasingly recognised. But there's the hope - which you always hear from someone when practitioners and analysts meet in workshops and roundtables - that this is just a Trump thing, that we just need to hold our nerve and things will come right again in January 2029. This is wishful thinking. As well as short- and medium-term crises, there's a long term crisis in relations between the US and its former NATO allies. The failure to understand the importance of the alliance for US security and the taking of allies for granted isn't unique to the Trump administration. There's always been a strain of American political thinking that's hostile to Europe. That won't go away whatever happens after 2028. Nor will the view that the depth of previous US engagement with Europe is a Cold War legacy and doesn't reflect future US security priorities. The US has been gradually pivoting away from Europe since the immediate post-Cold War threats were addressed during the 90s. Both the Bush 43 and Obama administrations were focused on the Asia Pacific as the long-term US security priority. Of course, all other post-Cold War administrations have, to varying degrees, understood the importance of the alliance with Europe for the US, and none of them have actively undermined it in the way that the Trump administration has been doing. But it's been clear for a quarter of a century that US and European security priorities are slowly diverging, at least to the degree that means its in the interests of all parties for Europe to increase its security autonomy. Neither the US nor European NATO members have been willing to fully acknowledge this: the US has wanted Europe to spend more, but on US arms and in the service of US priorities; Europe hasn't wanted to spend the money and or think about declining US engagement. But unless the US once again has a reason to see Europe as critically important for US security, then no future US administration will have a reason to spend the money or the political capital necessary to fully restore the relationship with NATO allies after Trump. This is why the old NATO is gone and Europeans (plus Canada), need to develop a new security framework to replace it. It's frightening, difficult, and expensive, but that doesn't make it less necessary or urgent. If, in the best-case scenario, the US wants to re-align with Europe at some point in the future, that would be enormously welcome, but it can't ever again become the linchpin on which the whole European security architecture depends.