Trump Reassures NATO – After First Shaking It
President Donald Trump left NATO’s latest summit having reaffirmed America’s commitment to collective defence, praised the alliance’s unity and claimed credit for pushing its members towards substantially greater military expenditure.
Yet the deeper message emerging from Ankara was less reassuring: America’s allies still cannot confidently predict what Washington will say or do next.
The summit provided a familiar mixture of confrontation and conciliation. Trump criticised several European governments, reserved particular anger for Spain over its defence spending and Iran policy, and threatened action against Spanish trade.
He also revived his demand that the United States should control Greenland, despite the island being part of the Danish kingdom and both Denmark and America being NATO members. By the summit’s conclusion, however, Trump was praising the gathering and reaffirming the alliance’s Article 5 collective-defence commitment.
That apparent contradiction is no longer regarded as exceptional. NATO diplomats have increasingly learned to manage the American President through a combination of visible burden-sharing, political flattery and carefully presented achievements.
European members have committed themselves to far higher defence expenditure, while the alliance has announced major weapons procurements and continuing military assistance for Ukraine.
Trump’s supporters would argue that his methods are producing results. For years, American administrations complained that Europe depended too heavily upon United States protection while spending too little on its own defence. Trump applied far greater pressure, and Europe is now committing money on a scale that once appeared politically impossible.
The danger lies in the cost of achieving it. Alliances depend not only upon weapons and spending targets, but also upon confidence that commitments will endure when tested. When partners are unsure whether today’s reassurance might become tomorrow’s threat, strategic planning becomes considerably more difficult.
For smaller countries, including Sri Lanka, there is a wider lesson. The international system increasingly revolves around transactional power rather than predictable rules. Relationships once described as permanent are now openly renegotiated, sometimes in public and sometimes under pressure.
America remains NATO’s dominant military power. Europe cannot yet replace it.
But Washington’s allies are now preparing for the possibility that American protection may become more conditional, more expensive and less predictable.
The NATO summit therefore succeeded in avoiding a rupture. It did not remove the uncertainty.
NEWSLINE ASKS
Can an alliance remain credible when its members are repeatedly unsure of its strongest partner?
Has Trump strengthened NATO by forcing Europe to spend or weakened it by undermining trust?
What should smaller states learn from an increasingly transactional international order?
