It’s easy for Trump to weaken NATO but pulling out of the pact is a lot harder

Updated April 2, 2026 — 7:54am,first published 3:35pm

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London: Donald Trump can weaken the purpose of NATO in just a few words. The US President needs a lot more than that, however, to pull America out of a defence pact that has underpinned western security for 77 years.

Trump has ramped up his complaints about European allies because of their lack of support for the strikes on Iran, and he has turned this into a test for NATO by saying a US withdrawal from the pact is now “beyond reconsideration”.

The comments, in an interview with London’s The Telegraph, came hours after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called NATO a “one-way street” and said the US would have to consider its membership in the wake of the war in the Middle East.

Trump’s remarks also revealed who he listens to on this: he said he thought of NATO as a “paper tiger” and knew that Russian President Vladimir Putin thought the same.

But that verdict from Trump and Putin fails the history test. NATO, after all, helped America win the Cold War when the Russian leader was a lieutenant colonel in the KGB. The alliance has proven its power when it is backed with political commitment.

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Trump has long complained about NATO, and pushed European leaders last year to pledge more defence spending to ease the burden on the US, leading to a deal that he claimed was a “monumental win” for America.

But his frustration about the Iran war has brought back the old complaints, leading The Telegraph to ask him in an interview if he would reconsider the US membership.

He replied: “Oh yes, I would say [it’s] beyond reconsideration. I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way.”

Trump argued that the US had helped Europe in the past and should have been given the same support when it launched attacks on Iran, adding that he believed this support should have been “automatic” given the history of the alliance.

“We’ve been there automatically, including Ukraine. Ukraine wasn’t our problem. It was a test, and we were there for them, and we would always have been there for them. They weren’t there for us,” he said.

There is no question that Trump can weaken NATO if he chooses. In fact, he is already doing it. The foundation stone of the alliance is the commitment by all members that an attack on one is regarded as an attack on all, and will lead to “collective self-defence” as they deem necessary, including the use of armed force.

Trump can nullify that written commitment simply by saying he would never honour it. His complaints about NATO have already sent this message, without an explicit statement of intent. American allies could feel confident about the way Ronald Reagan would react to a Russian threat. With Trump, they have to track his moods on social media.

Weakening NATO is not the same as pulling out of the pact. The US has about 84,000 military personnel in Europe, according to the US European Command, and is deeply embedded in NATO. It would take years to withdraw those forces, so any decision by Trump would only take effect if it was endorsed and acted upon by his successors in the White House.

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The NATO treaty, signed on April 4, 1949, has a provision that allows any of the 32 member nations to withdraw by giving one year’s notice.

The US Congress, however, has power over this decision because it passed a law in 2023 after Trump’s complaints about NATO during his first term as president. The law prevents any president from withdrawing the US from NATO unless this is endorsed by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.

One of the lead sponsors of the 2023 law was Rubio, then a Republican senator and a strong supporter of NATO. He has changed his view, but the law still stands.

European leaders scrambled to mollify Trump last year when he complained about NATO. This time, however, they appear to be holding their ground. Trump backed down from his tariff threats over Greenland, and they may be calculating that he will cool down over NATO membership as well.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer held his line on the Iran war when asked about Trump’s remarks soon after they were published. “This is not our war. We will not be drawn into the conflict. It is not in our national interest,” Starmer said at a press conference.

Starmer said NATO was the single most effective military alliance in the world. He did not mention Trump’s name, but he referred several times to “noise” that sought to change Britain’s position over the war in Iran.

“Whatever the pressure, whatever the noise, my job as British prime minister is to concentrate on what’s in the British national interest,” he said.

Britain is not exactly neutral in this war. The UK policy is to allow the US to use British bases for defensive operations – including bombing military sites in Iran – but not to join the attacks. Some British forces are defending allies in the Gulf against Iran by deploying aircraft and missile defence systems.

What appears to infuriate Trump is that no NATO ally will join him in an offensive operation, for instance in the Strait of Hormuz. On this, there is no sign of division among the Europeans.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, one of the Europeans who is closest to Trump, has publicly criticised the Iran war. Last week, Italy denied approval for US aircraft to land at the Sigonella air base in Sicily on their way to the Middle East, according to Reuters and others. A key factor was that the US had not sought prior authorisation from the government in Rome.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, a strong supporter of the US and Israel, said last week that he had rejected a request from Trump to join a military offensive in the Gulf, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“I told him, if you wanted our help, you should have asked earlier instead of going to the newspapers now,” Merz said.

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French deputy defence minister Alice Rufo set out the thinking in Europe at about the same time as Trump’s latest complaint was appearing in The Telegraph.

“Let me remind you what NATO is,” she told a conference in Paris, according to a Reuters report. “It is a military alliance concerned with the security ​of the Euro-Atlantic region. It is not designed to carry out operations in the ​Strait of Hormuz.”

Of course, NATO allies came to the aid of the US in 2001 after the terror attacks on New York and Washington DC, and this led to a long war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. There was no similar NATO decision in the war on Iraq in 2003. There is an obvious parallel with the Iran war: while Trump claims his move was self-defence, NATO allies clearly disagree.

Europe will be utterly exposed if the US withdrew from NATO. It would be vulnerable to even greater threats from Putin’s Russia and, possibly, Chinese manoeuvres. It would lose access to US intelligence and military resources. NATO could continue without the US, but at an enormous cost to the remaining 31 members. They would have to devise a collective nuclear deterrent, for instance.

But this is not the whole story, because the US would also be exposed. It would have to defend itself in the Atlantic without allies to keep potential threats at bay – like Russian submarines that could slip past the UK and make for the American coast.

Trump may think his friend in the Kremlin will be no threat, but will the next American president be so sure? Or the one after that?

There is a reason NATO has lasted for 77 years. It will take more than one president to change that.

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