NATO - the acceptance phase

A post-American NATO is no longer a risk, it's the base case.

Things can be true for some time before they become obvious. If a NATO summit from a few years ago had included a US president musing publicly about seizing part of another member’s territory, with a threat to withdraw all troops from Europe if his demands were not met, it would be seen as a complete disaster. If a NATO summit saw a US president refer to one of the alliance members as “hopeless, bad people” and decree, “cut off all trade … including visits”, there would be a sense of reaching the end of the road, of an epochal moment. But instead, most views of the NATO summit that is just coming to an end in Ankara are that it went pretty well.

Imagine what going badly would have looked like.

Part of the “success” can be attributed to the fact that Trump was distracted by the resumption of hostilities with Iran. Whilst he is sore that none of the NATO membership enthusiastically joined his war, the opportunity for Trump to talk at length about Iran (or at one point, “the Islamic Republic of Japan”, a fascinating counterfactual) meant that he had less time to focus on his negative views of Europe. And that left Europe to continue working through the stages of grief at the loss of America. At the beginning of Trump 2.0, the denial phase was pretty significant, particularly here in the UK where senior officials would tell me when Trump was first elected that nothing was changing with the transatlantic alliance, and everything was fine.

British officials reacting to the end of the transatlantic alliance. The cartoon is by KC Green and you can find his site here and support his work https://gunshowcomic.com/648

The anger has been on display at certain points, such as when Trump alleged that British and other troops had avoided the frontlines in Afghanistan (we lost 457 killed in action, as did many other countries). And there has certainly been bargaining: NATO countries offering to expand their defence budgets, a made-up Greenland “deal” (which is clearly non-existent), Europe paying the US for the weapons it sends to Ukraine.

But now we’re onto the depression and acceptance, which is why Trump’s outrageous behaviour elicits little more than a wearied shrug. America’s drawdown in Europe is still playing out: Pete Hegseth has instituted a six-month review of US military presence in Europe and it’s very clear that their overall footprint will shrink. The US has also used up a lot of its weapons on the pointless Iran debacle and will take years to replace them, meaning that even when countries want to continue to use American weapons they may have to wait years for stocks to become available.

In the early days, America's (entirely predictable, but still alarming) abandonment of Europe left its leaders grappling for responses. Now, these responses are more advanced. Of course, this doesn’t mean that Europe is ready to operate without America on its side, but it has started the acceptane that it will have to do so, one way or another. Plans are afoot to build a European long-range missile, including models that contain no US components meaning that their use by Ukraine and other European partners is not dependent on the whims of Donald Trump. NATO recently decided to replace its US-made Boeing AWACS early warning and control planes with ones made by Sweden’s Saab, partnership with Canada’s Bombardier. This represents a remarkable development for Sweden, a country that only joined NATO two years ago. And across Europe, companies are licensing or finding other ways to use Ukraine’s remarkable technological development to manufacture new weapons tested on the frontlines against the Russians, weapons that have little or no dependence on US technology.

None of this is absolute: the Europeans are still having to rely on many US systems and very heavily on US intelligence. The US itself isn’t talking seriously of leaving NATO (Trump’s talk can’t be regarded as serious), but it does appear to be an increasingly silent partner. Whatever happens, Europe isn’t (yet) creating sufficient defence capability to fill the hole left by the Americans. Also, America’s shifting of its own resources is more likely to be led by ideological questions, rather than in response to military and defence need. So, the challenge for NATO is immense and if there are future wars between a European NATO and Russia, they may not be able to be fought in the way that current NATO doctrine envisages. The US-led model of air superiority enabling fast manoeuvre warfare looks unlikely. So what might happen instead is something closer to what we’ve seen in Ukraine: slow attritional warfare.

Is this all overblown? Lots of people are dismissive of the idea that Russia would attack NATO when it is bogged down in Ukraine. On the other hand, there would never be a better time for Moscow than when the US has withdrawn some of its forces from Europe but the Europeans have still yet to shore up their own defences. The hardest part of this is planning: NATO summits are now predicated around preventing Donald Trump from losing his temper and making an extreme decision, so very little actual policy or planning gets done at the summit. But the moment Trump is safely out of the way, Europe needs to get serious about working out how it will fight its future wars. As Mark Carney said, “nostalgia is not a strategy”.