Will NATO’s life insurance for Europe end when Trump takes office?

according to the international group Tasnim news agency, Frankfurter newspaper In an article, Trend Shai of Germany addressed the dangers of the re-election of Donald Trump as the US president in this year’s elections for the NATO military alliance and especially its European members, and raised the question why Trump’s re-election endangers NATO?

This article says: In April, the world’s strongest military alliance turns 75 years old. NATO has always served the interests of all its members. But the re-election of Donald Trump could jeopardize this unity.

Claudia Major, head of the security policy research group at the Berlin Foundation for Science and Politics (SWP) in this regard. He said: NATO is very old, but it has always managed to be a life insurance policy for all members. In the 75th year of this military alliance, we should know what situation we are in and maybe NATO can be proud that it is still alive and not obsolete or brain dead.

After the election of the new American president in November, the question that arises especially for Europeans is: Will this life insurance last? For Heinrich Brauss, the former German general of NATO, it is clear that the biggest threat to the existence of NATO is Trump, not Putin. After 1990, it had its identity crises. At the latest, after the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, it was time to “return to the roots”. At that time, after decades of international crisis management, the old principle of the Cold War, that is, collective defense, was again taken into consideration. Russia is now the “most important and direct threat” again. The new force model, which was adopted in Vilnius in 2023, sees the defense of the Euro-Atlantic region as the main task, including the strengthening of NATO’s eastern flank and the admission of Finland and Sweden into NATO.

So far, agreed. Sweden’s pending accession, still blocked by Turkey and Hungary, may be only a small blemish. Just in time for the New Year, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced that he is sure that this country will be the 32nd NATO member at the military alliance’s anniversary meeting in July.

But NATO’s 75th birthday celebration in Washington will not be an interesting one. This celebration takes place in the shadow of the US presidential election campaign, and Europeans do not know what their life insurance will be like from November. Of course, so far the United States has tamed the centrifugal forces of the transatlantic alliance. Because they provide a large share of defense capacity. Because their strategic nuclear bombs protect the non-nuclear powers in Europe – including Germany. According to commentators, the American nuclear umbrella cannot be replaced by a European nuclear variant in the foreseeable future.

So far, three options have been discussed among security experts This is what the Trump administration has in its drawer regarding NATO:

Obsolete NATO: In his first election campaign, Trump announced the possible withdrawal of the United States. As John Bolton writes in “Notes of a former White House security adviser”, he wanted to explain this at the first NATO meeting in 2017. Trump said: “We’re out, we won’t fight if other people don’t pay.” But the question remains, is it so easy to leave? Trump has repeatedly stated that the United States will only defend countries that meet the 2 percent target for military purposes or even more. This, of course, amounts to blackmail. This effectively undermines the Subsidiary Clause (Article 5), one of the central pillars of NATO.

Sleeping NATO; Behind this option lies the idea of ​​a “dormant” membership of the United States of America. This means the non-expansion of NATO and the massive reduction of America’s presence in Europe. Sumantra Maitra, one of the proponents of this Republican doctrine, wrote in an article at the end of December: Anything other than nuclear power and American naval power will be a security burden for Europe.

In the Republican Party – and especially among the base of the party – the second and third options are widely supported. SWP security expert Claudia Major made a dangerous prediction and said: The United States will be in NATO, but as a completely unpredictable partner.

For a long time, NATO seemed inconceivable without the United States. Actually for 75 years. But US President Joe Biden, if re-elected, will demand a different distribution of loads in NATO. According to Majda Rogge, a political scientist from the European Council on Foreign Relations, we must be prepared for this. According to him, in the end, Germany should once again play the role that the German army had in the Cold War against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, that is, as the backbone of the conventional defense against Russia.

Biden: Trump seeks revenge

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