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When President Trump told The Daily Telegraph that NATO is a “paper tiger” and withdrawing the United States is “beyond reconsideration,” the foreign policy establishment erupted. It shouldn’t have. Trump was saying aloud what many inside the Pentagon have known for years. The surprise isn’t the criticism. The surprise is how long Washington waited to have this conversation.
I know this alliance from the inside. During the Cold War, I served as a U.S. Army infantry officer in West Germany, drafting contingency plans to blunt a Soviet armored assault long enough for reinforcements that might never come. Later, as a Pentagon strategist, I spent years alongside NATO counterparts watching the alliance expand its reach, add members and quietly lose the clarity of purpose that once made it formidable. Nobody in authority asked the tough questions about what we were building toward. We are now living with the consequences.
The Strait of Hormuz stripped away the pretense. When Washington called on NATO allies to help reopen a chokepoint through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil normally flows, Germany’s defense minister said flatly, “This is not our war, we did not start it.” Spain denied us airspace and bases. Most of Europe stood aside while Brent crude surged past $107 a barrel and American families paid four dollars at the pump. These are the countries we are treaty-bound to defend without question. When we asked for something in return, the answer was silence.
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But NATO was formed in 1949 to defend Europe against Soviet aggression — not to project force into the Persian Gulf. The allies knew nothing about the Iran operation before the first strikes went in. Washington acted, then demanded their support. Asking an alliance to follow you into a war of choice it was never briefed on, and then branding its hesitation cowardice, is not a test of reliability. It’s a test of obedience. Those are different things and conflating them weakens an otherwise legitimate grievance.
The Alliance’s membership rolls deserve the same hard look. NATO has grown from twelve founding nations to thirty-two members, and the expansion has not always served military logic. Many post-Cold War additions brought political symbolism rather than combat power — small nations with minimal deployable forces and armies that exist largely on paper, joining not because they could contribute to a fight, but because membership carried a security guarantee and a European identity. An alliance that cannot distinguish between members who can fight and members who provide little beyond a flag on a briefing slide has a credibility problem that goes deeper than spending percentages.
The numbers confirm what rhetoric obscures. The United States accounts for roughly 62 percent of NATO’s total combined defense spending — many times more than the second-largest contributor. In 2014, only three members met the 2 percent of GDP commitment; all thirty-two are projected to reach it soon, with a new 5 percent pledge by 2035. Progress under duress, not conviction — and commitments made under pressure have a way of softening once the pressure eases. Ukraine makes the same point: the United States committed $66.9 billion in direct military assistance to Kyiv since 2022 — the backbone of Ukraine’s survival — for a conflict on European soil, in the wealthiest continent in history. That is not generosity. It is a habit neither side has had the will to break. Trump’s frustration is earned.
Withdrawal is still the wrong answer. It requires congressional involvement — no president dissolves a treaty by press release. More important is what we lose. Walking away hands Vladimir Putin the greatest strategic windfall of his career, signals to Beijing that American commitments have expiration dates, and dismantles 75 years of basing rights, intelligence networks, and military interoperability built at enormous cost. NATO is a flawed institution. It is also infrastructure. Experienced commanders don’t blow up infrastructure because it needs repair. They fix it.
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Fixing NATO means confronting all three problems without flinching. Membership standards must reflect military reality, not political aspiration — nations that cannot field credible forces or meet spending commitments should not carry the same standing as those who do. Burden-sharing needs teeth: enforceable standards with real consequences, not aspirational targets members can ignore until Washington loses its temper. And the consensus rule that lets any single government veto collective action must give way to coalition structures that allow willing, capable nations to move without waiting for unanimity from thirty-two capitals with just as many different threat assessments.
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There is a larger question here. NATO was built to serve American strategic interests — as was the United Nations and most of the post-World War II architecture Washington constructed and has sustained ever since. Do these institutions still do that? If NATO has become a vehicle for European security on American credit, and the UN a forum where adversaries constrain American action more than advance American interests, then the Hormuz crisis is not an anomaly. It is a diagnostic. A serious administration should be running that review across the board — not just threatening to leave NATO in frustration, but evaluating which post-war commitments still serve the country that underwrites them and which have quietly become obligations without reciprocity.
The underlying problem will not be resolved on its own. Either Europe’s NATO members decide the alliance’s survival depends on their willingness to act like partners rather than clients — including honest conversations about which members can actually fight — or the United States concludes that maintaining the fiction of shared burden costs more than changing the terms altogether. The Iran crisis didn’t create that choice. It made it impossible to ignore. The question going forward is whether allied capitals treat this as a genuine inflection point or stall until American pressure cools. History says they’ll stall. The stakes say they can’t afford to.
I served in this alliance when the mission was clear and the commitment was mutual. The Cold War ended without a shot fired across the Fulda Gap because deterrence was real and everyone on our side believed we meant it. That credibility has been eroding for 35 years. Trump didn’t create this problem. Washington built toward it, one deferred hard question at a time. Those questions — about membership, mission, reciprocity, and whether these institutions still serve the nation that built them — are now on the table. The only thing worse than asking them too late is walking away before we get the answers right.
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