The idea that Trump will undermine NATO conflicts with everything Trump actually did while he was in office

Trump on February 14, 2023, via GettyImages

There couldn’t have been a more predictable wave of hysteria after Donald Trump said at one of his rambling rallies this month that if other NATO countries don’t “pay up,” he might just have to tell Russia to go ahead and “do whatever the hell they want” with them. Trump was actually recounting a vague anecdote — something he purportedly said to an unidentified European leader several years ago. Yet the premise of the ensuing hysteria was that Trump, if re-elected in 2024, would surely move to withdraw the U.S. from NATO as his first sinister order of business — because of course, Trump continues to have a burning desire to help Vladimir Putin.

Anyone who still buys into this storyline must have been hibernating since 2016. Or perhaps they were awake the whole time, but their belief in Trump’s nefarious alignment with Russia is so deeply ingrained that they no longer have the ability to process countervailing information — including, for example, the things Trump actually did when he was president for four years.

It’s true that focusing on Trump’s actual policy record, rather than what he blurts out at a campaign rally or in a Truth Social post, can be the less exciting analytical approach. But it also happens to be the most factual and rational one.

Unfortunately, the media’s professional Trump alarmists simply cannot countenance a reality-based version of Trump, so instead they must eternally cling to their fictionalized, Putin-colluding version. They might not even know, for instance, that Trump presided over two rounds of NATO expansion — Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020. While perhaps not the most formidable powers in the NATO military alliance, their seamless absorption was made possible by Trump’s fulsome support for enlarging the bloc — notwithstanding any vague NATO-skeptical rhetoric he might have inchoately dabbled in. 

Proceeding with these rounds of NATO expansion required Trump to take presidential action on multiple occasions, including personally signing the final ‘instrument of accession’ formalizing the countries as NATO member-states. Philip Reeker, a State Department official testifying on behalf of the Trump Administration in support of expanding NATO, said in 2019: “Let me begin by reaffirming the role of NATO. As President Trump has said, the alliance has been the bulwark of international peace and security for 70 years.”

Given the wildly disproportionate attention paid to Trump rhetoric over Trump policy, few of the current media alarmists are likely even aware that Trump expanded NATO twice. Nor could they come up with a convincing explanation for how this fits with their hallucinogenic nightmare of Trump surrendering NATO to Putin.

Congressman Mike Turner (R-OH) was called forth to address Trump’s comments while hobnobbing at the annual Munich Security confab last weekend. “This is what I know,” Turner said. “Donald Trump’s political rallies don’t really translate into Donald Trump’s actual policies. If you look at his policies, if you look at his record, he actually increased funding for NATO.”

“In fact,” Turner said, Trump “was the first president to give lethal weapons to Ukraine.”

Both assertions from Turner have the unusual benefit of being true, whether or not you think either act (increasing funding to NATO or sending lethal weapons to Ukraine) is a good thing. Trump still did both of them. 

Under Trump, the budget for something called the “European Deterrence Initiative,” a Pentagon program designed to “deter” Russia by building up NATO capacity in Europe, ballooned by several billions of dollars. Just another curiously missing fact from the standard howling media screeds:

Trump has also bragged consistently about how powerful and effective the Javelin missiles he sent to Ukraine were at killing Russian soldiers during their initial advance on Kyiv in early 2022. Ukrainian influencers became so enamored of the Javelins that they turned it into a national branding campaign, with illustrated renderings of “Saint Javelin” to become a fabled wartime icon. So it’s strange for it not to be more widely recognized that those revered Javelins were first delivered to Ukraine courtesy of Donald J. Trump.

For all the default assumptions that Trump has some obvious affinity for Putin, the public record ironically contains not a single negative word Trump has ever said about Volodymyr Zelensky — if anything, Trump has routinely praised Zelensky, often fondly reminiscing about how Zelensky defended him over their 2019 phone call that led to Trump’s first impeachment. On the other hand, in the weeks after the Ukraine invasion began, Trump joined Biden in accusing Putin of perpetrating “genocide.”

Putin himself commented recently that NATO “has just one purpose — as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy.” To the extent this is true, Trump has no self-interested reason to arbitrarily forfeit such a valuable instrument of American power — with the best evidence for this being that Trump didn’t do it in his first term. Instead, he sought to bolster NATO by rhetorically pressuring European member-states to increase their military expenditure, while on a policy level increasing overall U.S. support for NATO. According to NATO’s own figures, military spending in European NATO members-states went up every year Trump was in office. Why we’re supposed to believe Putin was delighted by this fact remains a mystery.

Many pundits still can’t quite comprehend that Trump is a staunch proponent of American hegemony — of which NATO is a major aspect — but not out of some deep ideological conviction in the everlasting sanctity of American imperium. Rather, he dispenses with the pieties often favored by other kinds of American hegemonists, especially the liberal interventionists always tirelessly sermonizing about the “rules-based international order,” as well as the rock-ribbed National Security conservatives who’re always agitating for ruthless military and ideological primacy against whichever Official Adversary has been selected to make everyone fearful that day.

So it continues to make no sense that a second-term Trump would arbitrarily disband NATO — just like it would’ve made no sense in his first term. Hence, he didn’t do it. Because if he did do it, Trump would be knowingly wrecking a valuable instrument of American military, economic, and political power, and there’s no reason to think Trump is looking to reduce the amount of power he’ll be able to wield as president.

When it comes to Putin, believers in the recycled Trump/Russia dogma remain sadly incapable of appreciating that NATO doesn’t just cease to function as a vessel of American hegemony simply because Trump is the one presiding over it. While Trump may not share the pious sentimentalities of European security officials regarding the role of NATO, that’s mainly a matter of rhetoric. Which again is why it’s typically more useful to examine policy instead of rhetoric.

Still, the permanently histrionic pundits will insist that Putin stating a preference for Biden over Trump last week must’ve been an elaborate ruse of reverse psychology. Putin must secretly prefer Trump, they insist, despite Trump’s record on everything from NATO to Ukraine totally conflicting with Putin’s stated preferences. “Putin is not a fan of mine, actually,” Trump said at a recent rally. This would only be difficult to believe if you’re one of those thumb-sucking pundits who simply doesn’t care what Trump actually did when he was in office — even though it’s the best possible window into what he’d be likely to do again.