The latest NATO summit is in the books. This year’s confab in Ankara, Turkey, featured less drama than some had expected. Yes, President Trump demanded Greenland and threatened to cut trade ties with Spain. But he confirmed that the United States would not leave the alliance, at least for now, and pronounced the summit “tremendously successful.” “The unity in that room was incredible,” he told reporters, “really a love, it was sort of pretty wild.”
Together with the revelation that the White House recently nixed a plan to cut the U.S. troop presence in Europe by a third, this must have left our NATO allies feeling pretty good. Their gambit—that a mix of flattery and bigger defense budgets would be enough to keep the U.S. on the continent—appears to have paid off.
This is a pity, because the truth is that our NATO allies are not really rearming. And even were they to do so in earnest, it’s unclear how that would serve America’s national interests.
As was reported before the summit, NATO leaders have held secret discussions on how to effectively trick the president into deferring any major decisions on the alliance until the end of his term. Some have even proposed scrapping the annual summits, in the hopes that this could allow NATO to fly under the radar and make it to 2029 without incident.
Although much of the Europeans’ case relies on exaggeration and deception, it’s not the case that rearmament is uniformly a farce. Some countries, notably those that share a border with Russia, have indeed raised their spending. Estonia, for example, devotes fully 5.4 percent of its annual GDP to defense (though this figure is striking as a proportion, it accounts for a mere $2.4 billion—less than my home state of Pennsylvania spends on its Department of Corrections).
But in other places spending has been flat (as in Slovakia) or even declining (as in the Czech case). Italy has tried to fudge its numbers by including in its total spending things like domestic law enforcement—which may be following the letter of last year’s pledge to hit NATO-wide targets, but absolutely violates its spirit. And then there is Germany, the linchpin of any European rearmament effort, which has already had to walk back many of its grandiose promises of a sea change on defense.
But even if the Euros were to pull this off, it’s unclear why we should care. The United States has an interest in keeping Europe from falling under the sway of a single hegemon, of course, but our allies already have more than sufficient capabilities to deter or defeat a conventional Russian attempt at conquest, were any such thing contemplated (and the evidence that Putin is seriously interested in grabbing land outside Ukraine is thin indeed). And beyond that, there are no core interests served by European rearmament.
In fact, one can even see how more defense investments could be a bad thing for us. Sustained budget increases could allow European hawks to escalate in Ukraine and raise the risks of a direct NATO–Russia confrontation (a possibility worth considering, since much of the new defense spending that is showing up is being channeled into arms for Kiev).
Some have also argued that America’s presence in Europe allows for power projection into the Middle East. Leaving aside the question of whether facilitating our involvement in that region’s interminable conflicts is itself desirable, the recent kerfuffle with Italy over the use of our bases for Operation Epic Fury suggests that even this is not guaranteed.
By appearing to condition U.S. commitments on European defense spending, Trump is ultimately giving our allies a measure of control over our foreign policy. They themselves recognize this: during the summit, one NATO diplomat said NATO leaders increasingly viewed Trump as “the boy who cried wolf.”
Indeed, the playbook for future NATO summits—if the alliance keeps up the practice—has already been written.
First, NATO’s Secretary-General will pay a visit to the White House, as Rutte did in June. He will talk up European defense investments, paying particular attention to those contracts that are going to American weapons makers, and lavish the president with a metric ton of flattery and praise. The generational shift underway will be attributed to Trump in the hopes that our president will feel a sense of personal ownership.
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Then, at the summit, everyone will be polite. Kaja Kallas’s disastrous meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio will not be repeated; there will be no open criticism of the United States. Our allies will praise President Trump for getting Europe to spend more, as Germany’s Friedrich Merz did, without caring overmuch about the actual numbers. And everyone will walk away happy.
There is another path, however. Although Hegseth was told to stand down from pulling back a third of our forces from Europe, the Pentagon is still pursuing a six-month review of our force posture in Europe, the goal of which is to “ensure that NATO is moving fast and irreversibly toward Europe leading, stepping up to take primary responsibility for the defense of Europe.”
This is a good idea. It allows the Pentagon to build up a clear, unabashed case for the withdrawal of our conventional forces from the European continent. Because bringing the troops home is the ultimate card. And at the conclusion of this review, President Trump should play it.
