Collateral damage is a universally acknowledged hazard of war – more commonly known for its impact on truth and non-combatant civilians.
Its consequences are much less frequently visited on military alliances.
The United States’ North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) allies are fearful that may be about to change as a result of the fallout from Washington’s decision to team up with Israel in waging war against Iran.
Donald Trump has attacked the pact with a vehemence rarely heard over what he regards as disloyalty and failure to help in re-opening the strait of Hormuz. Tehran closed the strategic waterway in response to the military onslaught it faced in the conflict, which is currently paused thanks to a two-week ceasefire brokered by Pakistan.
Trump’s criticisms of the 77-year-old alliance are nothing new; accusations of freeloading against allies for supposedly inadequate defence spending date back to his first term. But the stridency and threatening nature of Trump’s complaints have escalated, triggering fears that he could abandon the alliance – an act that would require approval from Congress.
The air of panic drove Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, into a hurried trip to Washington, where he tried to soothe Trump’s resentments in a closed-door White House meeting on Wednesday.
The two-and-a-half-hour session did not go smoothly, despite Rutte’s reputation as a “Trump whisperer”.
“It went shit,” an unnamed European official told Politico, calling the encounter “nothing but a tirade of insults” in which Trump “apparently threatened to do just about anything”.
Afterwards, Trump resorted to his familiar fusillade of abuse on his Truth Social platform, posting in capitals: “NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!!”
Omitted – to widespread relief – was any definitive declaration that Trump intended to withdraw from an alliance that the US founded in 1949 with 11 other countries, in what was then seen as a vital bulwark against the spread of Soviet communism. Since the end of the cold war, it has expanded to include 32 countries.
In a speech to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute a day after the White House showdown, Rutte – a former Dutch prime minister – fluctuated between self-flagellation and self-abasement in his condemnation of his fellow Europeans for previously failing to meet their own defence costs, while voicing understanding for Trump’s viewpoint over Iran.
Nato members had been “a bit slow, to say the least”, he conceded, to provide support for the US’s war against Iran – a campaign about which none of its members had been consulted and few supported.
But praising Trump for his “bold leadership and vision”, Rutte argued that Nato would survive not in spite of the US president’s splenetic outbursts, but because of them.
“President Trump’s commitment to progress reversed more than a generation of stagnation and atrophy by reminding Europe that values must be backed by hard power – hard power provided not only by the United States,” he said, referring to an allied commitment agreed last year for members to spend 5% of GDP on defence by 2035.
“Why, then, does everyone in this room have a knot in their stomach about the future of the transatlantic alliance? Why, when we turn on our televisions or scroll on our phones, do we see eager early drafts of Nato’s obituary? Let me be clear, this alliance is not whistling past the graveyard.”
Yet its physical survival may conceal a multitude of moral wounds inflicted by Trump’s rhetorical assaults, which have included belittling Nato as a “paper tiger” and demanding that one of its founders, Denmark, cede Greenland to the US – putting Washington on a potential military collision course with other members.
Additionally, there has been profound shock over the macabre nature of Trump’s bellicose threats against Iran – among them a warning that Iranian civilization would be eliminated “never to return” if the country’s leaders did not open the strait of Hormuz.
Analysts say Trump’s demands and accusations, coupled with threats to commit what many saw as tantamount to genocide and that ran contrary to Nato’s values, corrode the trust that has sustained the alliance.
“It is hard to imagine that the current war with Iran and the crisis over the strait of Hormuz does not represent a fundamental rupture in the North Atlantic security structure,” wrote Francis Fukuyama, a historian at Stanford University.
“Nato is an alliance built on trust: its deterrent value rests on the belief that NATO members will come to one another’s aid if a member is attacked. Trump is accusing alliance members of betraying the United States by not collaborating with it to re-open the strait–but no one ever signed up to wage offensive war.”
Charles Kupchan, director of European studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former adviser to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, said that while Nato’s European members were trying to keep Nato afloat until the end of Trump’s presidency, they have long-term fears about the alliance’s future, amid suspicions that the US no longer shares their values.
“The United States has always tried, in some ways, to be an idealist power that’s navigating a realist world, and [it] wanted to change the world,” he said. “[But] you could argue that the world has changed the United States, and now it is just another great power playing by the rules of realpolitik, like Russia or China. I think that mystifies allies and confounds allies.”
Kupchan predicted a domestic backlash against Trump’s hostility towards Nato – which retains significant support among the US public – that would produce a more traditional posture towards the alliance from a successor administration.
But allied suspicions would persist, he warned: “If you are an American ally, you now have to wonder whether the United States is passing through a prolonged period of political dysfunction and unpredictability that forces you to call into question its reliability? My answer is yes.
“That’s because this is not just about Trump. This is about the hollowing out of America’s political center [and] a foreign policy that has been swinging quite wildly from one extreme to the other. The world has whiplash.”
Still, Trump’s withdrawal from Nato is thought unlikely given the presence of 80,000 US troops and numerous military bases in Europe, which are vital components in the projection of American global power that has become a hallmark of his second presidency.
Kristine Berzina, a Nato specialist at the German Marshall Fund, said Trump’s attacks risked weakening the alliance at a time military cooperation within it is at an all-time high.
“The magic of Nato is not only the real military power, and that is actually still as strong as ever, but what is the deterrence effect, and how aligned are all of the allies within the alliance?” she said. “When there are such open attacks on it from its strongest member, at the very least, it’s dispiriting. It calls into question the military power in a way that is not reflective of the actual reality and the very close coordination between the militaries in the alliance.”
More damaging still, she warned, is the danger of western European nations widening the breach with Trump by waging a war of words that could provoke the White House into turning its back on the alliance, leaving eastern European members exposed to Russian aggression.
“What I’m getting increasingly concerned about is a sense from western Europeans in particular that speaking out against Trump is going to be in their interest,” Berzina said. “The reality is that Europeans cannot do without the United States, when facing down the possibility that a revanchist Russia could try to cross Nato’s borders. The countries that are loudest in efforts to push back against Trump and his rhetoric right now are the countries least likely to have to face any consequences of such rhetoric on their own soil.
“Europe is stuck with the United States, and it has to make the best of it. Yes, it’s bad right now. It’s unpleasant and unfortunate and regrettable and stressful, but [the US] is indispensable.”
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