Reports of the death of NATO are exaggerated. If former President Donald Trump wins back the White House in November and decides the United States should withdraw from the alliance, he would be unlikely to secure the backing of both chambers of Congress and two-thirds of the Senate. At most, a second Trump presidency would press NATO’s European members to deliver on their promises to pay more for their defenses and threaten not to come to their aid if they don’t. If President Joe Biden retains power in November, his second term will continue his Trump-lite nudging of Europe to pay more for its defense, only minus the threats.
Either way, the old NATO is over. Or rather, the two older NATOs are over. The first, the original NATO, was founded in 1949 for the Cold War. In the words of its first secretary general, the British soldier-diplomat Hastings Ismay, NATO was meant to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” NATO Mk. I’s goals became anachronistic, first through the rise of Germany as Europe’s prime economic power and then through strategic victory in the Cold War. The second NATO, which developed in the end-of-history enthusiasm of the 1990s, was NATO the global interventionist, the multilateral loincloth on America’s unipolar Tarzan. NATO Mk. II lost its way amid the war on terror’s confusion of anti-terrorism with democracy promotion.
The third-stage NATO is now being negotiated in a new context. The post-2008 policy continuities between Democratic and Republican administrations include reducing the American military footprint in Europe as part of a pivot to the Indo-Pacific region and pressing European allies to meet their post-2014 commitments on defense spending. Liberal democracies are always slow to mobilize, and elected governments are always glad to defer spending on defense, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused the kind of crisis that forces a reassessment.
Europe’s leaders have responded to the death of the old NATO with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief. Denial that the American gravy train was running out of steam led to anger at Trump for telling them that the free ride was over and then bargaining with Biden over whether and how to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Depression ensued as the Ukraine war revealed that Europe was incapable of defending its borders without American munitions, American leadership, and the American backstop that underwrites NATO; that America’s defense industrial base was too run down to supply Ukraine’s demand for key munitions; and that Europe lacked the means to construct an alternative.
Europe is now coming to the fifth and final stage: acceptance. The Americans really mean it when they ask European states to step up. Trump means it even more than Biden. European politics is becoming more nationalistic. Borders are back inside the European Union, and the Ukraine war has shown stark divergence between national priorities. Europe’s share of the global economy is shrinking, and the global system is becoming increasingly volatile. Hard power is more necessary than at any time since the Cold War. The Zeitenwende, the “turning point” announced by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is real. There is no turning back.
In the spring, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, French President Emmanuel Macron, and European Commission High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Josep Borrell all announced plans for rearming Europe. This being Europe, it’s not clear how the three proposals fit together. Nor is it clear how their proposers expect to pay for them — or even whether all of their proposals align with American interests. Still, this is progress. We don’t yet know what NATO Mk. III will look like, but we can expect it to appear.
On April 21, Sunak visited NATO’s eastern frontier in Poland. At a press conference with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Sunak announced “the biggest strengthening of our national defense in a generation.” He committed to raising Britain’s defense spending from the current equivalent of 2.32% of GDP to 2.5% of GDP by 2030. Expenditure would rise from 64.6 billion pounds ($80.8 billion) in 2024-25 to 87 billion pounds ($108 billion) in 2030-31, with 10 billion pounds ($12.5 billion) to be invested in munitions production, reformed procurement processes, and a new Defense Innovation Agency for research and development.
Sunak echoed Scholz’s language: “Today is a turning point for European security and a landmark moment in the defense of the United Kingdom.” The plan, Sunak’s team told the media, sets “a new standard for other NATO countries to follow.”
Some of them are still failing to meet the old standard. In 2014, NATO’s members agreed that their defense spending should equate to 2% of GDP. At the time, only three states did so. This year, 18 of NATO’s 31 members will meet or exceed the 2% target, with Germany meeting its commitments for the first time ever.
Current combined European defense spending amounts to $380 billion. If all NATO countries matched Britain’s commitment to spending 2.5% of GDP on defense, Europe’s collective expenditure would rise by some 140 billion pounds ($175 billion).
“There are three pillars of British grand strategy,” said Sumantra Maitra, the director of research and outreach at the American Ideas Institute. “One is not to have a hegemon in the European continent. Two, to keep a check on anyone trying to form an alliance in the European continent. And three, to have the United States engaged in Europe as a force multiplier.”
These commitments are consistent whether Britain’s government is Conservative or Labour. So are commitments to a cradle-to-grave welfare system and its crown jewel, the National Health Service. Sunak has suggested that increased defense spending would be funded from cuts to welfare and civil service budgets, but this is the fiscal equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The combined cost of the flagships of Britain’s new defense posture, two aircraft carriers, was 6 billion pounds ($7.52 billion) — roughly equivalent to two weeks’ spending on the National Health Service (annual budget, $180 billion).
Sunak and the Conservatives are on course to a landslide defeat in the general elections that must be held before the end of the year. If cutting health and welfare spending is a hot potato, Sunak’s April announcement heated up the potato prior to dropping it into Labour’s hands. But Labour might be more successful than the Conservatives when it comes to juggling the need to expand defense spending while cutting welfare and health spending.
Labour wants to avoid the historic suspicion that the party of the Left is unpatriotic and weak on defense. As the party of the Left, Labour created the welfare state and the NHS. The public suspects that the Conservatives wish to annul them and trusts that Labour will reform them. And Labour believes in state funding. “Britain doesn’t have a defense industrial base resembling that of the United States or Russia,” Maitra noted. “The only way Britain can actually do this is through building up state capacity. And that’s something which only the Labour Party is going to do.”
We could call Sunak’s vision “continuity NATO.” The alliance changes in order to remain the same. There’s more “burden-sharing” from the Europeans, but the U.S. still leads from the front. The British prefer that, not least because it fits their grand strategy for Europe. This isn’t the vision that Maitra outlined in a 2023 paper calling for a “dormant NATO,” with the U.S. providing backstops (the nuclear umbrella, naval guarantees of the seaways), but the Europeans essentially organizing their own defense. That paper, and the Trump camp’s interest in it, caused a collective panic attack in Europe. Over the last year, European strategists have started to consider how they might go it alone. As going it alone is a French specialty, Macron is years ahead.
Macron took Trump at his word as early as 2017. In a speech at the Sorbonne in Paris that year, Macron argued that Brexit and the Trump presidency left the EU with little choice but to resume its long march toward total political and economic union. The first item on Macron’s list was military union: “a joint intervention force, a joint defense budget, and a joint doctrine for action.” The EU, he said, needs “a European Defense Fund,” with “permanent structured cooperation” and “a European intervention initiative that better integrates our armed forces at all stages.”
In 2017, France’s defense budget was 32 billion euros ($34.2 billion). In January 2023, Macron committed France to doubling its defense spending to just over 60 billion euros ($64.8 billion) by 2030. The spending includes designing a next-generation aircraft carrier, launching 15 new frigates, developing a hypersonic air-to-ground nuclear cruise missile, and developing a Franco-German tank. By 2035, the French air force intends to fly only aircraft made in France or by the Future Combat Air System, a Franco-German-Spanish collaboration.
Macron, like a 21st century Charles de Gaulle, seeks to strike an independent balance between les Anglo-Saxons to the west and the Russians to the east. This is the common thread in the zigzag pattern of his policy statements. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Macron spoke of incorporating Russia into a European security architecture. In the early months of the Ukraine war, Macron sought to adopt an understanding, if not conciliatory, approach to Russia’s territorial ambitions.
The same desire has driven Macron to suggest that Ukraine be inducted immediately into the EU and that NATO boots be placed in Ukraine, suggestions that offended Scholz and his ministers and led Russian President Vladimir Putin to threaten the use of nuclear weapons. Now, it leads Macron to characterize Russia as an existential threat to Europe and to intensify his call for Europe’s strategic autonomy.
On April 25, Macron returned to the Sorbonne. Four days earlier, Sunak had described his defense plans in a quick press conference. Macron delivered a two-hour peroration. Europe, he said, will no longer be a “geopolitical priority” for the U.S. “There is a risk our Europe could die. We are not equipped to face the risks.” He called for a European effort to build an independent military that, while buttressing NATO’s “European pillar,” could also act independently of the U.S. “when necessary” under a common “security framework” that can attain its own “neighborly relations” with Russia, which is now viewed with “strategic ambiguity.”
The new European force’s assets would include the European Sky Shield Initiative, a German-led air-and-missile shield program that Macron had previously opposed because France has invested in a rival Franco-Italian program. They also include France’s nuclear weapons, also under a doctrine of strategic ambiguity. The ambiguity, and the ambiguous extension of French nuclear protection to the rest of Europe, is nothing new, but their strategic significance has changed.
In 1963, de Gaulle withdrew the French nuclear option from NATO in 1963 and expelled NATO bases from French territory in 1966, yet France remained within NATO. France did not fully return to NATO’s command structures until 2009, but French nuclear policy retained an independent conception of France’s “vital interests.” While it is doubtful whether Britain could operate its nuclear weapons without American approval, and doubtful that Britain would refuse an American request to use them, France preserves what Macron calls nuclear “specificity.”
At the same time, French leaders have discussed the “European dimension of France’s vital interests” since the 1970s. After Brexit, France is the EU’s only nuclear-capable power. Macron, who in April called French nuclear weapons “an indispensable part of the European continent’s defense,” has previously proposed joint exercises between the air forces of EU members and France’s nuclear-capable air force. The “most far-reaching scenario,” Łukasz Maślanka of Poland’s Center for Eastern Studies wrote, “could see some French nuclear weapons stored in countries where French nuclear-capable jets would also be stationed.”
In this kind of “dormant NATO,” the U.S. would struggle to retain its monopoly over NATO policy and would lose much of its strategic influence over Europe. Macron knows this. “Just as Britain sees America as a force multiplier in Europe, so Macron thinks the European Union is a force multiplier for France,” Maitra said. “The French want to use the European Union as essentially a proxy for French hegemony.”
Security and defense, Borrell said on April 9, “has become THE European issue.” Depending on “who is ruling in Washington,” the American umbrella “may not stay open all the time.” Europe’s rainy day is coming. Borrell is more of a diplomat than Macron, so he said he prefers “strategic responsibility” to “strategic autonomy,” but it means “basically the same.”
“NATO will remain absolutely irreplaceable,” Borrell said. “But inside NATO we have to build a strong European pillar.” In 2022-23, 78% of EU defense expenditures were spent outside the EU, with 63% going to the U.S. Borrell called on Europe to escape this “strong dependency” on American supplies. Like Macron, Borrell called for a centralized European defense capability, procuring weapons from European arms companies.
In March, Borrell announced the first European Defense Industrial Strategy. Currently, EU members duplicate their capabilities by pursuing national defense policies. Under EDIP, they will be expected to maximize their collective investment by following central directives. It’s true that Europe’s collective production base is feeble compared to that of the U.S. It’s also true that a similar combination of protectionism and dividing the labor produced Airbus, whose market value is now worth $24 billion more than Boeing’s. As the defenders of Germany’s willingness to trade with dubious regimes used to say, Wandel durch Handel: “Transformation through trade.”
France is the world’s second-biggest arms exporter. Germany has a budget surplus. Borrell compared the potential for defense collaboration to the economic collaboration that founded the new Europe’s common market in 1957, the union of French coal and German steel. The second stage, he said, was the creation of the EU’s single market and currency in the 1990s. He called the creation of a united defense policy the “third act of the EU project.”
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It isn’t accidental that NATO and the EU have moved through a three-stage development in tandem. NATO is the silent partner that has made the EU possible. As NATO keeps expanding, so does Europe. NATO is always recruiting new members, and Macron is offering to extend France’s nuclear coverage up to a border that has yet to be finalized. The end of the road for Europe, full political, economic, and military consolidation, could mean the beginning of the end for NATO. If the EU follows through on its plans for strategic autonomy, NATO Mk. III won’t be superfluous — the EU will still want those American backstops — but it will be unmanageable.
“What happens tomorrow if Europe wants to be a consolidated power with its own defense spending under one flag and one army?” Maitra asked. “Is America going to just allow that to happen? I seriously doubt that.”