Earlier this month, during a campaign stop in South Carolina, former president and presumptive 2024 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump went off on NATO, one of his favorite punching bags. “NATO was busted until I came along,” Trump asserted. “I said, ‘Everybody’s going to pay.’ They said, ‘Well, if we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They couldn’t believe the answer.” To emphasize the point, Trump stated he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies that fall short of the alliance’s defense-spending standards.
The fallout was swift. Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, called Trump’s remarks “irrational and dangerous.” Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill were aghast, while others downplayed the comments as an attempt by Trump to scare the Europeans into boosting their defense budgets. During the annual Munich Security Conference in Germany this month, Trump’s words, and the prospect of a second Trump presidency, hovered over the transatlantic dignitaries like a bad cold.
Yet in the weeks since, those few sentences in South Carolina have prompted a prevailing sense of urgency in European capitals. Even those who find Trump’s rhetoric boorish and alarming note that he has a point: European defense industries have been left to atrophy since the Soviet Union collapsed more than 30 years ago and are ramping up only now, after two years of war in Ukraine. “It’s high time for Europe to improve its own deterrence capacities and take its security into its own hands,” senior European Parliament lawmaker Valérie Hayer claimed. Dutch defense minister Kajsa Ollongren agreed, stating matter-of-factly that “Europe indeed needs to take more responsibility for its own security.” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is even basing her reelection campaign on beefing up the institution’s capacity to spend more and “spend better.”
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