By: Azhar Azam
The NATO summit in Ankara was expected to showcase allied solidarity after European nations agreed to a historic increase in defense spending. Instead, it ended with President Donald Trump intensifying his criticism of the transatlantic alliance.
Beyond burden-sharing, he lambasted European allies for declining to support US military campaign against Iran, arguing that the United States had spent decades underwriting Europe's security. Having long pressed Europe to spend more on defense, Trump now appears to measure allied loyalty by support for US-led military operations.
Trump's assumption rests on a premise that European allies benefitting from US security guarantees are also supposed to fight America’s wars. But that was never the bargain Nato struck in 1949. Although the alliance's role has evolved to crisis management, its core purpose remains safeguarding the freedom and security of its members, a commitment Europe has largely fulfilled.
After the September 11 terrorist attacks, Nato for the first and only time in its history invoked Article 5. Europe fought alongside the United States in Afghanistan for two decades, treating an attack on America as an attack on itself.
While Washington by far had the largest casualties in absolute terms, The United Kingdom lost 457 troops, Canada more than 150 and France 90. Germany, Italy and other countries also suffered significant casualties. Some European countries with much smaller populations than the US lost almost as many troops in relative terms. Denmark – facing intense pressure from Trump to cede its semi-autonomous region of Greenland to the US – recorded one of the coalition's highest per-capita fatality rates.
The 2003 Iraq War exposed deep political rifts; it did not represent European abandonment. Britain, Italy, Poland, Denmark and several other Nato allies joined the US-led “coalition of the willing,” while France and Germany opposed the invasion. The failure to find the alleged weapons of mass destruction later vindicated much of the skepticism surrounding the war. Yet those disagreements neither fractured Nato nor prevented its members from fighting together against the Islamic State.
Trump has long chastised European allies of freeloading on US military power, while failing to invest adequately in their own defense. In response, Nato members at last year's Hague summit agreed to dramatically increase defense spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, the alliance's most ambitious spending pledge to date.
European nations have since accelerated military procurement, expanded defense-industrial production and assumed greater responsibility for protecting the continent. Nato officials now acknowledge European allies have filled almost all the gaps left by US reductions to the Nato Force Model.
The summit showed that the debate has shifted the focus from burden-sharing to Nato’s purpose. During the US military campaign against Tehran, Trump criticized European allies for refusing to deploy naval assets to secure the Strait of Hormuz, which many European governments reckoned lay outside Nato's defensive mandate. Unlike Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks or the defense of Nato's eastern flank, they viewed attacks on Tehran as a discretionary military operation rather than an allied responsibility. Their reluctance reflected not anti-Americanism but a different understanding of Nato’s purpose.
So far, Trump has judged allied commitment by defense spending. Europe responded by committing to the higher spending target. The real issue emerging from the Ankara summit is whether Nato remains a collective-defense alliance or it is an organization whose members are expected to support US-led military operations beyond the alliance's traditional remit.
For more than seven decades, Nato has endured because its focus remained on defending against common threats without requiring its members to support every military campaign undertaken by another ally. This principle allowed the alliance to survive differences over the past conflicts without losing sight of its central mission.
Trump may expect Europe to shoulder a greater share of Nato's defense burden. But alliance solidarity cannot be measured by participation in every US-led military campaign. If this becomes the new benchmark of allied loyalty, Nato risks blurring the distinction between collective defense and collective intervention that has sustained the alliance through decades of political disagreement.