Through President Donald Trump’s two tenures in the White House, NATO leaders have often sought to placate the American leader’s demands, to temper his brazen threats against the most powerful military alliance in history. This summer, however, Trump is no longer the only leader seeking to put distance between the United States and the alliance’s other 31 member nations.
This time, notable leaders among longtime American allies are more expressly opining about a future in which the alliance is less entangled with America and its leader’s antagonizing approach to diplomacy.
“We could remove all of our soldiers out of Europe.”
U.S. President Donald Trump
“I don’t know why the president of the United States behaves this way toward his own allies,” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a onetime European booster of Trump, said after Trump claimed that she “begged” him for a photo last month.
Trump’s drive toward isolation within NATO has accelerated since the dissolution of his friendship with Meloni and the exit of his other key European partner, Viktor Orbán, who as Hungary’s prime minister initially sought to block Finland and Sweden’s inclusion in NATO in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
Following Trump’s years of incessant attacks on NATO partners, the leaders from only four of NATO’s 31 other nations agreed to join the U.S. president onstage for the signing of his self-created Board of Peace, a loosely governed international organization that sought billions in financing for the reconstruction of Gaza and a line item for Trump that designates him as chairman for life.
Last week, ahead of the NATO summit, Trump posted on Truth Social that it would be “ridiculous” for the U.S. to “continue along this one sided path when the relationship is not reciprocal,” claiming that the alliance has been financially “one sided” while scolding its members for not contributing more robustly to the U.S. war effort against Iran.
The president’s attempted shaming of Europe, however, has coincided with direct threats to use American military force as a means of acquiring Greenland, the semiautonomous territory of Denmark, a founding member of NATO.
When MS NOW asked the U.S. president in February at the White House whether he would commit to not attacking a NATO partner, Trump declined.
“I don’t talk about that,” he responded before waving off the repeated question.
On Tuesday, in his first public comments in Ankara, Turkey, where the summit is taking place, Trump issued a new direct threat to Europe.
“[Greenland] should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark, and when they wouldn’t go along with [giving the U.S. control], and with all the money we spend to help them with Russia,” Trump said before laying out potential actions to strike a deeper divide with Europe. “We don’t have to spend any money [on Ukrainian defenses]. We could remove all of our soldiers out of Europe.”
Trump’s visit to Ankara coincided with Russia’s deadliest attack on Ukraine this year, when a barrage of missiles killed at least 21 civilians in Kyiv. The attack highlighted Ukraine’s dwindling supply of missile interceptors, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has argued are crucial to the country’s defense.
In an urgent letter to Trump in May, Zelenskyy wrote, “For a nation fighting for its survival, there is hardly anything more painful to see than Patriot batteries with no missiles loaded. I ask for your help in protecting Ukraine’s skies from Russian missiles.”
Zeslenskyy has also pushed for production licenses to allow Ukraine to produce its own Patriot missiles.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has increasingly turned to partnerships with countries more willing to accommodate his demands in order to open links to the American economy without the ethical demands once seen as barriers to closer diplomatic relations.
As leaders of several longtime U.S. allies, including Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and French President Emmanuel Macron, effectively vowed to steer their countries away from a reliance on the U.S. for national security and economic matters, it was Middle Eastern monarchies and the heads of authoritarian governments, like Belarus and Hungary, that took their place at Trump’s side.
“There is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along,” Carney told the World Economic Forum in February. “To accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety — it won’t.”
Macron, for his part, pointed to the foundational shift already underway, which has jolted the world order that has mostly held since the end of World War II.
“We’re shifting to a world without rules. Imperial ambitions are resurfacing,” Macron said at the same conference in Davos, Switzerland.
The defense of Ukraine, Russian aggression and the ability of European countries to produce and access an arsenal of weapons are expected to be top priorities for global leaders, with special scrutiny of the U.S.’ military commitments to the region, following reports of a lengthy phone call over the weekend between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has zealously sought to assuage concerns about Trump within the alliance in the past two years, even referring to him in 2025 as “Daddy.”
Trump’s escalatory antagonism toward NATO, however, is echoed by other prominent, notably younger individuals within his administration.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told NATO defense ministers in Brussels in June that some of the U.S.’ allies are “shameful” for publicly criticizing the war against Iran and for not providing adequate access to bases and ports on the continent to launch strikes on Iranian targets.
As a result, Hegseth announced that he would launch a six-month Pentagon posture review of American forces in Europe “designed to ensure that NATO is moving fast and irreversibly toward Europe leading.”
“What we’re seeing now in NATO is most of the alliance headquarters, they don’t trust Trump, they don’t trust Hegseth,” retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling said. “They’ve got to realize they’ve got to go at it alone: ‘How do we incorporate new capabilities to what the Americans used to provide?’”
Hegseth said the U.S.’ payment of dues to the NATO budget would be contingent on other countries’ meeting their defense spending targets. Last June, the NATO countries agreed at the Hague summit to invest 5% of their countries’ gross domestic product on defense spending by the year 2035, up from the 2% guideline set in 2014.
MS NOW asked the Pentagon for more details about the posture review and was referred to the secretary’s remarks in Brussels with no further elaboration.
The review comes after Hegseth announced in May that the Pentagon would remove approximately 5,000 U.S. troops from Germany and cancel the deployment of an additional 4,700 troops to Poland and Eastern Europe.
The Pentagon’s troop adjustments happened after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz publicly criticized the lack of a clear U.S. strategy with Iran.
Hertling, as commanding general of United States Army Europe from 2011 to 2012, oversaw a Pentagon posture review in 2012 that led to a drawdown of forces to 34,000 from around 90,000 in 2004. He said posture reviews are important to conduct from time to time to examine the number, capabilities and location of military troops but emphasized that such reviews must be done gradually and in coordination with the European partners.
“What we’re seeing now in NATO is most of the alliance headquarters, they don’t trust Trump, they don’t trust Hegseth.”
Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling
Hertling said that when a military alliance accustomed to sharing systems for training, logistics, intelligence and other capabilities suddenly faces a massive drawdown with little communication, it can have a domino effect. Not only can adversarial countries like China use that as an opportunity to build their own military alliances or to invest economically, as China has in Africa, but public statements can also be interpreted by hostile figures like Putin as a sign that the U.S. might not come to the defense of Europe or Ukraine as it has in the past, Hertling warned.
Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey spent seven years at NATO assignments, including two as deputy U.S. representative to NATO. He asserted that cutting American investment in the alliance and jeopardizing U.S. relationships in Europe will significantly reduce its ability to operate around the globe, including in the Middle East and Africa.
“We can’t power project globally — it’s the end of it,” he said.
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