NATO faces existential test as Trump pivots toward Moscow

The blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag still sits beside NATO's compass rose on the alliance's homepage, accompanied by a declaration that the organisation "condemns Russia's war against Ukraine in the strongest terms" and remains "steadfast in its support". The problem is that the alliance's largest member, the country that provides roughly 70 percent of NATO's military spending and the nuclear umbrella underpinning Article 5, no longer appears to agree with the text.

The strategic contradiction at NATO's core

Since the 2022 invasion, NATO's strategic concept has designated Russia once again as a "threat", the most important principal threat, in the document's wording. That concept was agreed by all 32 members, Washington included. Yet in the weeks since Donald Trump returned to the White House, the United States has moved into open rhetorical alignment with Moscow on the war's origins and trajectory, while the vice-president, JD Vance, used the Munich Security Conference in mid-February to tell Europeans they must take defence into their own hands. From Warsaw, defence secretary Pete Hegseth delivered the same message more bluntly: Europe must invest because "you can't assume that the American presence will last forever".

Trump himself put the transactional logic into words on 6 March. "My biggest problem with NATO is that if the United States had a problem and we called France or other countries that I won't name and said we've got a problem, do you think they would come and help us, as they're supposed to? I'm not sure." The remark inverts the alliance's founding bargain: the US security guarantee was never conditional on European reciprocity in North America. It was a one-way commitment grounded in the recognition that a Soviet, now Russian, breakthrough on the North European plain would threaten American strategic interests directly.

Article 5 and the nuclear question

The only invocation of Article 5 in NATO's history came after the 9/11 attacks, when the United States called on its allies to join the intervention in Afghanistan. Every European ally and Canada answered. That record is what Amélie Zima, head of the European and Transatlantic Security Programme at the French Institute of International Relations (Ifri), points to when she says there has been "no statement from the Trump administration calling into question the foundation of the alliance, Article 5". She notes that when asked in the Oval Office whether he would defend Poland, Trump replied immediately: "yes, we are committed". Asked about the Baltic states, he hesitated, "a sort of grimace", but concluded the same.

The hesitation matters. Article 5 does not specify the means of assistance; it leaves "any means deemed necessary including the use of armed force" to each capital. The credibility of the guarantee has always rested on the assumption that the United States would escalate to nuclear use if conventional defence failed. That assumption held through the Cold War because the alternative, a Soviet-dominated Europe, was unacceptable to Washington. If a US president calculates that the Baltic states are not worth a nuclear exchange with Moscow, the guarantee becomes a political statement rather than a military reality. Fabrice Pothier, who ran NATO's foresight unit from 2010 to 2016, puts it plainly: institutionalising the current US position in the strategic concept would constitute "a real institutional crisis". The difference between a spirit no longer of transatlantic concord and writing that discord into the alliance's founding text is the difference between a marriage in trouble and a divorce filing.

Europe's rearmament moves ahead of The Hague

While the political argument plays out, the material response is already underway. The European Commission has validated the ReArm Europe plan, mobilising up to €800 billion for European defence. Mark Rutte, NATO's secretary general since October 2024, has pointed to Poland's 4.7 percent of GDP defence spending as the benchmark others should follow. Only a handful of members, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Greece and the United States, currently meet or exceed the 2 percent target agreed at the 2014 Wales summit. Germany, the alliance's second-largest European economy, crossed the threshold for the first time in 2024 after a one-off €100 billion special fund.

Alexis Vahlas, who directs the European security master's at Sciences Po Strasbourg and served as a NATO political adviser, argues the dual track is rational: "Today, there is a feeling of anxiety that is leading to a dual attitude." On one side, Europeans work to preserve Western cohesion inside NATO; on the other, the 23 EU members who also belong to NATO are preparing to rely more on their own structures. The ReArm Europe plan is not framed as an alternative to NATO but as a complement, "no exclusivism", in Vahlas's phrase. Pothier goes further, suggesting the credible alternative is being built outside both NATO and EU frameworks, around a coalition of key countries willing to move faster than the lowest common denominator allows.

Military interoperability under strain

The practical consequences of political drift are visible in exercise planning. On 7 March, Swedish media cited unnamed NATO sources saying the United States had informed allies it would stop participating in the planning of future European military exercises from 1 January 2026. Three days later, a US military source told Stars and Stripes that NATO was "continuing to prepare for military exercises involving the United States this year and beyond". The contradiction is itself revealing. General Jean-Paul Paloméros, formerly NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, told RFI that these exercises "are fundamental because they are representative of the alliance's ability to fulfil its collective defence mission. If there are no more exercises, there is no longer any demonstration of credibility and joint training. That is NATO's great strength."

Interoperability, the ability of 32 national militaries to communicate, share targeting data, refuel each other's aircraft and operate under a single command structure, is not a given. It is maintained through constant practice. The US provides the bulk of enablers: strategic airlift, aerial refuelling, intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance satellites, and the command-and-control architecture that binds them. If Washington withdraws from the planning cycle, the atrophy begins immediately. Rebuilding those habits without the US would take years and hundreds of billions of euros Europe does not yet have.

Historical parallels and the limits of analogy

NATO has survived crises before. In 1966, Charles de Gaulle withdrew France from the integrated military command, doubting American willingness to trade New York for Paris in a nuclear exchange. France returned only in 2009 under Nicolas Sarkozy. In 2016, candidate Trump called NATO "obsolete"; as president he reversed course. In 2019, Emmanuel Macron declared the alliance "brain dead" after the US unilaterally withdrew troops from northern Syria without consulting allies. Each time, the institution bent but did not break.

Zima draws the 1960s parallel precisely: the shift from massive retaliation to flexible response raised the same question, would a US president really initiate nuclear war to defend West Germany? The difference today is the source of the doubt. Previous deviations came from smaller allies, Viktor Orbán's Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Turkey, or from European capitals seeking autonomy. This is the first time the deviation comes from the alliance's leader, the country that provides the nuclear guarantee and the majority of conventional mass. As Zima puts it: "There have always been deviations, such as with Viktor Orban's Hungary or Turkey, but this is the first time that these deviations have been made by the world's leading political and military power."

The coalition of the willing outside formal structures

If the June summit in The Hague becomes a confrontation over the strategic concept's wording, whether Russia remains "the most important principal threat", the alliance faces a choice between institutional rupture and strategic ambiguity. Muriel Domenach, France's former ambassador to NATO, insists the daily military cooperation continues: "While we are talking, Europe's armies are working within the NATO framework, and this cooperation is useful whatever the framework, EU, NATO or ad hoc." That pragmatism is the likeliest near-term outcome: NATO survives as a planning framework and interoperability platform, while the real security decisions migrate to a smaller group of capitals, Paris, Berlin, London, Warsaw, Rome, and perhaps Stockholm and Helsinki, that accept the Russian threat as existential and are willing to fund the response.

Natalia Pouzyreff, co-chair of the French delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, frames the European argument in terms the US once used: "Ukraine is our shield and it is Europe's shield, and if Europe is not secure, that is not good for the Americans." The continuum she describes, European security as American security, was the bipartisan consensus from Truman to Biden. Whether it survives a second Trump term is the question the Hague summit will answer, explicitly or by silence.

What the June summit will decide

The summit in The Hague was always scheduled as a routine stocktake: defence spending pledges, capability targets, the next strategic concept review cycle. It has become a moment of truth. If the US delegation presses to soften or remove the language on Russia, European leaders will face a binary choice: accept a strategic concept that no longer reflects their threat perception, or block consensus and expose the alliance's fracture. Rutte's public insistence on US guarantees suggests he is managing expectations, not resolving them. The unconfirmed report on exercise planning, denied but not disproven, suggests the practical disengagement may already be underway regardless of what the communiqué says.