Trump Says He’s Done With NATO — and This Time He Might Mean It

What began as fury over the refusal of allies to join the Iran war has since produced a Pentagon order pulling 5,000 troops from Germany, with President Trump subsequently vowing to cut “a lot further;” threats to do the same in Italy and Spain; and a leaked plan to accelerate the broader European drawdown with little notice to allies. Mr. Trump called NATO a “paper tiger” four times while taking questions from reporters in the spring. So, once again, the question hangs over transatlantic security: Is Mr. Trump negotiating, or is he genuinely done?The answer may hinge on what emerges from the alliance’s July 7-8 summit in Turkey, and whether a single gathering can paper over fractures this deep. The strait and the riftFor Mr. Trump and his inner circle, the immediate trigger is geography and oil. For months, Iran had brought a near-total halt to maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — a chokepoint transited by roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply.Ship traffic plunged from roughly 130 ships per day before the war to just 191 vessels in the entire month of April, and gas prices for American consumers surged more than 40 percent before falling back in response to the 60-day ceasefire signed on June 17.Mr. Trump demanded that NATO members assemble a naval coalition to reopen it. Italy, the United Kingdom, France, Greece and other countries flatly refused, though they offered to help police the strait once a ceasefire was established.The refusal has sharpened into something personal. Mr. Trump expressed fury that allies would not allow the United States to use military bases on their soil to launch attacks against Iran, singling out Britain’s Royal Navy for scorn: “You don’t even have a navy. You’re too old and had aircraft carriers that didn’t work.”European governments have their own accounting. Officials in London and Paris view the Iran war as a conflict of choice launched without prior consultation.“This is not our war,” Germany’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius, stated bluntly. “We have not started it.”Mr. Trump’s anger escalated beyond rhetoric and threats. In May, the Pentagon announced plans to withdraw approximately 5,000 troops from Germany over the next six to 12 months, after Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the Trump administration lacked an effective strategy in Iran and that Tehran was humiliating Washington. Mr. Trump expanded the threat to Italy and Spain, and a Pentagon source told Germany’s Welt am Sonntag in late May that Washington may accelerate the broader European drawdown, with plans to be presented to allies at the July summit in Turkey. “Italy has not been of any help to us, and Spain has been horrible, absolutely horrible,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.As of December 2025, there were roughly 35,000 active-duty American troops in Germany; 12,662 in Italy; and 3,814 in Spain.An internal Pentagon memo outlined options for punishing NATO allies deemed insufficiently supportive during the Iran war — including suspending Spain from the alliance entirely.Meanwhile, the United States ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, pushed back on a call for unity from Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, telling Newsmax: “It’s not the time for another strongly worded statement. It is time for capabilities. It is time for frigates in the Strait of Hormuz.”Mr. Starmer traveled to the Gulf to support an earlier ceasefire in mid-April — a two-week pause that called for the reopening of the strait — as NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte arrived in Washington for what allies privately called a not-so-successful rescue mission.Mr. Trump’s all-caps post after the meeting left little ambiguity: “NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN.” The president described Mr. Rutte as “a great guy” after a return visit to Washington this month, but again said America had been “let down” by its European allies.The law his secretary of state wroteThere is a significant obstacle standing between Mr. Trump’s threat and its execution, one authored in part by his own secretary of state. A law passed by Congress in 2023 prohibits a president from withdrawing from NATO without either a two-thirds Senate supermajority or an act of Congress.The bill was co-sponsored by a Democratic senator, Tim Kaine of Virginia, and Marco Rubio who was then a senator from Florida. It passed as part of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.At the time, Mr. Rubio posted on X: “No United States President should be able to withdraw from NATO without Senate approval.”That post went viral, drawing 2.3 million views within days. Mr. Rubio now strikes a different tone, saying the administration would have to “re-examine whether or not this alliance that has served this country well for a long time is still serving that purpose.” That is a long way from the senator who wrote the law to prevent exactly this scenario.Mr. Trump has told reporters he believes he can make the NATO decision unilaterally — a position his allies are grounding in the “unitary executive theory,” the argument that a president may exit treaties without Senate approval.A senior military analyst at Saalex Corporation, Walter Berbrick, tells The New York Sun the question is “legally unsettled with credible arguments on both sides.” His views do not reflect those of Saalex Corporation, the United States Naval War College where he serves as an analyst, or the United States government.Mr. Berbrick cautions that even a court challenge may not resolve the matter cleanly: “Even if it did, the outcome is far from clear.”The top Republican on the bipartisan Senate NATO Observer Group, Senator Thom Tillis, said it is “factually not true” that Mr. Trump can pull out of NATO without Congress, yet acknowledged the president “can poison the well” and make the alliance “functionally defunct” if he chooses.What happens nextThe institutional damage is already accumulating. NATO is now weighing whether to curtail its practice of annual summits after the July gathering in Turkey. The 2027 summit in Albania would likely shift to the fall, and some members are pushing to skip the meeting entirely in 2028 — Mr. Trump’s final full year in office. A former deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO policy, Jim Townsend, tells the Sun the mechanics of withdrawal are far more complicated than Mr. Trump may appreciate.”“It’s not just getting a moving van, pulling up to the White House, loading it up with furniture, and away it goes,” explains Mr. Townsend, who is now a senior adviser at the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative. He notes that Washington and its allies are so deeply intertwined militarily — through command structures, force posture, and basing arrangements — that a genuine exit “would take a long time.”Mr. Berbrick cautions against concluding that the damage to NATO is irreversible, describing the conflict over Iran as “significant, but less as a singular breaking point and more as an accelerant of trends already underway.”“NATO has weathered significant challenges before, and the institutional and military ties are strong,” he asserts. “The key issue going forward is credibility.”On who stands to gain most from the current moment, however, there is little ambiguity.“It’s something that [Russia’s president, Vladimir] Putin would love to see. It’s something the Soviets and Russians have worked for for years — to see NATO split up and the United States out of Europe.”“That’s their dream,” Mr Townsend says. “And here they’ve been able to pull it off if, in fact, Trump leaves. They could say, ‘Look what’s happened,’ and they didn’t even have to lift a finger.”

Trump Says He’s Done With NATO — and This Time He Might Mean It

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