What is the point of NATO? The defense ministers’ summit on June 18 and the visit by the NATO Secretary General to Washington last week in advance of the leaders’ summit due to take place on July 7-8 in Turkey have made it seem as if the military alliance’s main purpose is the appeasement of one of its members, Donald Trump, rather than dealing with the military threat posed by Russia, the country NATO was set up in 1949 to guard us against.
Four years into the war in Ukraine, amid regular military provocations by Russia all over Europe, that issue has become painfully and perhaps damagingly secondary to the effort to keep the Americans on board.
Last year, as Trump’s second term in the White House was opening, it made sense to try to keep America committed to the defense of Ukraine, of Europe and hence NATO. An alliance that had served both sides of the Atlantic well for nearly 80 years should not be casually thrown away because of the whims of one American president, who if the US Constitution remains intact will anyway be gone by early 2029.
Even if Trump could not be persuaded to support Ukraine in the way his predecessor, Joe Biden, had done, he could at least be cajoled into not actively hurting Ukraine or helping Russia.
A year and a half later, this strategy’s one clear success is that America has not hurt Ukraine directly. To that can be added the fact that Trump’s attempt to seize Greenland from Denmark’s hands has failed, at least for now, thanks to a strong and unified response from the rest of NATO.
Otherwise, the scoresheet is distinctly negative: America has helped Russia repeatedly, including by welcoming Vladimir Putin in August last year to a summit on US soil for the first time since 2007, by pressuring Ukraine to cede territory to Russia and by relaxing sanctions on Russian oil during the Iran war.
And now Washington has announced a six-month review that is expected to lead to some US force withdrawals from Europe and has accused European NATO allies of “disloyalty” for having failed to join America in Iran.
Admittedly, the argument over supporting America in Iran has had one good outcome. It induced Mark Rutte, the NATO Secretary General, to make public the number of American warplanes that had taken off from US bases in Europe during the Iran war. He said there had been 4,000-5,000 such flights, about 500 of which were from bases in Italy.
This has produced a furor in Italy’s parliament, and elsewhere, over whether allowing these flights amounts to a direct participation in a war most European governments and public opinion opposed. But regardless of that issue, the military implication is clear: the United States gets a huge benefit from being able to have more than 40 military bases in the United Kingdom, the European Union and Turkey.
The whole European continent acts like a massive fleet of aircraft carriers for the United States, enabling it to station combat forces and surveillance equipment much closer to their potential targets than if they were back home in America. US politicians like to claim that these bases mean that the US military is protecting Europe – but in fact the bases are crucial to America’s ability to project its power globally.
Only as and when the United States decides that it no longer wishes to be a global power will these European bases become redundant to America’s national interests.
What this also means, however, is that the balance of power within NATO should have changed along with the change in the balance of benefits from America membership. Now that the United States, under Trump, no longer sees Russia as a threat but rather as a potential great-power partner, the benefit to European NATO states of having America as a member has plummeted. But the value to the United States of having those 40-plus bases in the UK, the EU and Turkey is as high as ever.
It used to be thought that US membership in NATO was vital to Europe for its deterrent effect, that the mere threat of American military intervention would persuade any potential adversary – which means Russia – that an invasion or other attack would not be worth the risk.
But Trump has made it clear that he does not believe in the commitment to mutual defense under the NATO treaty, so until another president comes along with a different view that deterrent effect has been lost.
European members of NATO are right to hope that when that new president comes along in 2029 the American attitude will change. It takes a long time to restructure military and political institutions, certainly longer than the two and a half years remaining of Trump’s term, so it makes sense to preserve the ones that exist, if you can.
But in the meantime, the European NATO members should recognise that they have leverage: Whatever Trump may say, America needs NATO more than the Europeans need America.
Accordingly, the appeasement should now cease. When Trump or his officials choose to attack Europe they can and should be resisted, strongly, just as Giorgia Meloni did over Trump’s claim that she had “begged” him for a selfie while they were both attending last week’s G7 meeting in France. European leaders can and should remind Trump and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that America’s possession of military bases in Europe is a privilege, not a right.
More important than dealing robustly with America, however, is the need to avoid being distracted from NATO’s central mission: preventing Russia from destabilising Europe and threatening its security. Discussions about how to carry out this mission have already largely moved from NATO to the European Union and to more informal structures that include the United Kingdom. Those new structures now need to be given a higher priority.
In particular, what is needed is a credible military command structure that in a time of crisis will not be vulnerable to interference from the United States. Fortunately, such a structure does exist in the form of the Joint Expeditionary Force, a force originally set up in 2014 and which now consists of 10 countries, including four Scandinavian members, three Baltic States, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, where the force’s headquarters are sited.
The best hope for NATO’s Ankara summit on July 7-8 would be that Trump and his complaints will be ignored or rebutted; and that as preparation for a potential crisis with Russia more countries join the Joint Expeditionary Force and give it more money to make it more credible. The point of NATO is to deter, resist and counter threats from Russia. Only if it can be equipped to do that will the alliance be worth saving and extending in the long term.
This English original of an article published in Italian by La Stampa also appears on Bill Emmott’s Global View. It is republished with permission.
