As NATO Meets in Ankara, Trump Demands Loyalty and Billions More in U.S. Arms Deals
Last month, NATO’s top official, Mark Rutte, showed Trump a chart he had titled “The Trump Trillion.” The message was not subtle. Look how much money we spend. Look how many jobs it makes for you. Please, whatever you do, stay.
For most of our lives, the NATO alliance meant something sturdier than a sales pitch. It rested on a promise that an attack on one member is an attack on all, the pledge written into Article 5 of the treaty. That promise has been formally triggered exactly once in NATO’s history, and it was triggered for us, when allies rushed to our side after the September 11 attacks, according to NATO’s own record.
Now the promise is being repriced. Trump has spent this year recasting a security alliance as a customer relationship, and the numbers tell the story. At last year’s summit, members agreed to lift defense spending toward 5 percent of their economies by 2035, up from the old 2 percent target, according to NATO. European allies and Canada raised their combined defense budgets by close to 20 percent in a single year, NATO reported. And this week in Ankara, the U.S. ambassador to the alliance, Matt Whitaker, praised those allies for nearly $120 billion in new defense spending, roughly half of it on American-made equipment, as reported by Politico.
Rutte told Washington that European orders now support 110,000 American jobs through some $300 billion in weapons contracts, according to Politico. Those are real paychecks in real places. When we talk about NATO, we are also talking about factory shifts in Ohio and Alabama.
And yet Trump says it still is not enough. “We don’t need their money,” he said last month. “I just want loyalty,” according to the Associated Press. That word should chill us. Loyalty is what you ask of an employee, or a subject. It is not the language of a partnership among democracies.
The shift is not just rhetorical. The Pentagon has told allies it will scale back the forces it would send if one of them is attacked, and it has pulled troops from Germany and canceled deployments to Poland, according to both the AP and Politico. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly told European ministers the alliance had become a paper tiger stuck in unhealthy codependence on American power. This is happening while Russia flies drones near military bases across the continent, testing where the fences are weak.
Why should any of this matter to us, an ocean away? Because the arrangement that has kept large wars off European soil for generations is far cheaper than the alternative we learned about twice in the last century. Twice we tried to stay out, and twice we were pulled in. NATO was the bet that we would never have to pay that price again.
An alliance you can buy is an alliance someone else can outbid. If loyalty is now the currency, then trust becomes the thing we quietly spend down. The leaders in Ankara can announce all the billion-dollar deals they want. The harder question is for us at home. Do we still believe our security is something we share with friends, or just another deal waiting to be renegotiated? That answer will not come from a summit. It will come from what we demand of the people we elect. Go beyond the headlines…
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