Can NATO survive without America?

They reminded each other that in the whole history of NATO, the mutual defence clause Article 5 had only been invoked once — and it hadn’t been against Russia, but when terrorists attacked America. And then Putin, as Robertson recalled in a BBC Radio 4 interview, spoke to him in English: “If we can make this work, Mr secretary general, we’ll change the world.”

With hindsight, we can shake our heads at the blithe optimism of that era. But despite all the evidence of Russian aggression since then, for most Europeans NATO has remained a bulwark — a guarantee of protection. After the invasion of Ukraine, Sweden and Finland were sufficiently confident in the alliance to abandon their neutrality and join up too.

No more. The US “remains committed” to NATO, Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defence, said in Brussels. But it “will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency.” Europe must “own responsibility for its own security.” He spoke of making NATO “great again”.

Hegseth’s warning came soon after President Trump announced his desire to take over Canada and, perhaps less absurdly, Greenland. Nothing in Article 5 anticipated the possibility that its most powerful member might invade the territory of another. Then came Trump’s vicious attack on President Zelensky, which drove another painful wedge between the US and Europe.

This is NATO, but not as we know it.

Yet if all this has come as a shock to many European civilians, defence experts are unmoved. “I’m shocked that NATO is surprised,” says Ed Arnold, a senior research fellow at the think-tank RUSI. He is a former Army infantry officer who was working at NATO’s European headquarters when Russia occupied Odessa in 2014. “Europeans have ignored numerous wake-up calls. Now the US is saying, ‘this is for you to sort out, we’ve got other priorities.’”

Even before Trump’s re-election, America was “annoyed with Europeans for not pulling their weight in terms of security, particularly when their security risks are far more disproportionate.” The US has 80,000 troops stationed in Europe and Trump wants them to come home.

Europeans who believed that Article 5 gave them automatic protection against aggression were always mistaken, Arnold says. “The treaty is deliberately written to be ambiguous, precisely because the Americans didn’t want to be drawn back and have to fight world war three.” 

In fact, each member is responsible for deciding what it deems necessary to protect the integrity of the alliance. That might not even be military assistance. “If Russia annexed the whole of Estonia and the US sent a single AWACS surveillance plane, they would be living up to the letter, if not the spirit of Article 5,” says Arnold.

Nor is there any certainty that NATO would agree to invoke Article 5 in the first place. The leaders of Hungary and Slovakia are sympathetic to Russia and they have a vote on the Council. “For some of the younger generation, NATO is not this cold war institution that’s protected us for 80 years. It’s an institution that’s failed us.”

So what will NATO be able to do now that the US no longer sees us as a priority? And who will take charge when America steps back? 

The Supreme Allied Commander in Europe has always been an American. That may change, says Gesine Weber, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund. She has written about the model of a “dormant” NATO which, she believes, is the rational response to uncertainty about the US’s commitment to the alliance — uncertainty that she says will not go away when Trump leaves office.

In this world, “Europeans would be responsible for the lion’s share of conventional capabilities, but the US would remain involved for deterrence, so the nuclear umbrella would continue to exist.” The US would be a “backstop”, and European states would have to step up and invest heavily in armaments, soldiers and equipment. To ensure Europe has real strategic autonomy, it will need to source weapons at home.

The European defence industry is not ready for that yet. But Weber thinks it could provide a much-needed boost to European manufacturing. In fact, some countries are already thinking along these lines: it was barely noticed in the media, but in October the UK’s Sheffield Forgemasters signed a deal to supply gun barrels to Germany’s Rheinmetall AG as part of the Trinity House Agreement. 

Outside the EU, the UK is not part of the European Defence Fund. That may matter less than it did. As geopolitical realities change and the EU struggles to find consensus, Poland is more likely to find a congenial defence partner in the UK than in Putin-friendly Hungary.

But Zelensky’s ambition for a “European army”, an idea which used to be part of the Eurosceptic lexicon, is extremely unlikely to be realised. “It’s off the table. You would have to create everything from scratch, which would need a lot of time and resources,” says Weber. “It would be much easier to leverage the fact that EU and other armies already have interoperability.”

Ultimately, it comes down to fear. Are European publics ready to put themselves on a war footing? How much does the rest of the EU and the UK care about its newest members in the east? 

If western Europeans decide they have enough problems to deal with at home, NATO will be a dead letter. But if Russia once again feels like an existential threat, the alliance still has a long way to go.