President Donald Trump is radically altering NATO — a multinational alliance that has maintained global security in the roughly eight decades following the end of World War II — so that instead of the US being the leader of its more than two dozen members, it is instead merely “one of 32.”
Instead of openly abandoning NATO the United States under Trump is "quiet quitting," which means stepping back piecemeal from the leadership role it had previously assumed, reported defense expert Sara Bjerg Moller in the magazine Foreign Affairs. Among other things, US Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker stunned European officials when he suggested Germany assume NATO's supreme allied commander position, even though the United States has traditionally assumed that role. Trump is also relinquishing command of operational-level headquarters and reducing US personnel at various NATO installations.
While Trump claims this will save America money and make the country more secure, Moller reports the opposite may happen.
“It will find that walking away from overseeing NATO’s military machinery is far harder than anticipated,” Moller wrote. “NATO’s command structure was built around US infrastructure and personnel, and no other member of the alliance is currently equipped to replace Washington.”
Moller elaborated on the massive infrastructure problems that NATO will face as it attempts to replace the US personnel who are being pulled away.
“Europe’s armed forces are already stretched thin after decades of underinvestment, with the armed forces of several countries, including Germany, scrambling to find enough officers to train new conscripts and recruits,” Moller wrote. “Expecting these depleted militaries to produce hundreds of experienced senior officers to assume planning duties now performed by US officers in the next two years is simply unrealistic; the backbenches are all but bare.”
At the same time, this does not mean NATO members entirely oppose the US reducing its presence there. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned world leaders at a Davos summit last month that “middle powers” would need to fight “hegemons.” NATO leaders themselves have observed Trump behaving “erratically,” further raising their security concerns, and Trump’s recent attempt to militarily seize Greenland from Denmark has caused a shift in the “paradigm” through which Europe perceives US foreign policy.
"Individually, Trump's attacks against allies — threats of tariffs, insulting British troops, downplaying NATO, a photo-op with (Russian President Vladimir) Putin in Alaska last August, sanctioning the International Criminal Court, a public feud with Canada, or setting up a U.S.-led 'Board of Peace' — might have been survivable," former British diplomat Alexander Dragonetti wrote in an op-ed published last month in iPaper. "Taken together, they have a cumulative effect.”
Moller perhaps best summed up all of these views in her closing paragraph.
“The United States may not be withdrawing outright from NATO,” Moller wrote. “But its quiet disengagement from its role as alliance manager, honed over decades to the shared benefit of Washington and Europe, will close the book on nearly a century of productive partnership, permanently weakening the United States in the process.”