THE UNITED STATES IN NATO: FROM ALLY TO EXPLOITER?¹

Robin ASHBY^*

INTRODUCTION

As NATO leaders gathered in Ankara on 7-8 July 2026 for the Alliance’s 36th summit, the gap between the organisation’s formal commitments and its functional reality had never been wider – or more consequential. European allies arrived with record spending pledges and billions in new defence contracts. President Trump arrived demanding ‘loyalty,’ furious that Europeans had refused to join his war with Iran. The distance between those two positions is the subject of this paper. It is not a paper about one difficult American president. It is a paper about a structural shift in the transatlantic relationship that will outlast any individual administration – and that is forcing Europe, whether it is ready or not, toward a strategic autonomy it has spent seventy years avoiding. In a world increasingly defined by competition between the United States and China, the question of whether Europe becomes a third strategic pole – coherent, capable, and self-determining – is no longer academic. Ankara, in its complicated way, is accelerating the answer.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF ALLIANCE: WHAT THE US BUILT

NATO was an American creation, and the Americans knew it. The Washington Treaty of April 1949 was sold to a sceptical US Senate not as altruism but as forward defence: better to hold the line on the Elbe than fight again on the beaches of Normandy. The logic was strategic, not sentimental.

For four decades, American primacy within the Alliance rested on three pillars: the nuclear guarantee, the forward deployment of substantial ground and air forces, and the institutional architecture of SHAPE, SACEUR, and the integrated command structure. The US did not merely contribute to NATO; it led it, shaped it, and in doing so made it an instrument of American strategic interest as much as a collective security arrangement.

The post-Cold War ‘peace dividend’ introduced the first structural stresses. American forces in Europe fell from roughly 300,000 at the Cold War’s peak to around 65,000 by 2013. Enlargement – absorbing fourteen new members between 1999 and 2020 – extended commitments without proportionally expanding capability. The 2% GDP defence spending target, agreed at the Wales Summit in 2014 in the aftermath of Crimea’s annexation, was as much an American demand as a collective aspiration. Few met it. The stage was set for a reckoning.

THE TRUMP VARIABLE: FIRST TERM AND SECOND TERM COMPARED

Donald Trump’s first term (2017-2021) introduced language previously unthink-able from an American president. NATO was ‘obsolete.’ Allies were ‘delinquent.’ The 2% target became an American grievance rather than a shared ambition. Yet the insti-tutional guardrails held: Mattis, McMaster, and Kelly absorbed and deflected the most destabilising impulses. Article 5 was eventually, reluctantly, reaffirmed.

The second term is different in kind, not merely degree. The guardrails are gone. The officials who constrained the first administration have been replaced by ideolo-gical allies of the ‘America First’ project. The signals now emanating from Washington are not the complaints of a frustrated paymaster; they are the demands of a state recon-sidering its strategic obligations.

The Conditional Guarantee

The most significant development is the explicit conditionality now attached to Article 5 commitments. Senior administration figures – and the President himself – have stated or strongly implied that the American response to an Article 5 event would depend on whether the attacked ally had met its spending commitments. This is not a negotiating position. It is a fundamental revision of the Treaty’s logic, and it does not become less dangerous for being delivered informally.

Article 5 is deliberately ambiguous: it requires each party to take ‘such action as it deems necessary,’ not automatic military response. The Americans have always known this. What is new is the willingness to say so publicly, and to attach financial conditions to the deployment of that ambiguity. Deterrence depends on adversary uncertainty about intent. The Kremlin, watching carefully, is no longer uncertain.

Bilateral Dealmaking with Moscow

The administration’s pursuit of a bilateral US-Russia accommodation over Ukraine, conducted without meaningful European consultation, represents a second structural departure. Whatever one concludes about the strategic merits of détente with Moscow, the process has been corrosive. European governments learned of significant concessions – on Ukrainian territory, on security guarantees, on the future of Ukrainian NATO membership – from press reports rather than allied consultations. This is not alliance management. It is the behaviour of a great power that has decided its partners are an audience.

Iran, ‘Loyalty,’ and the Goalposts

At Ankara, the goalposts moved again. European allies who declined to join the US-Israeli war on Iran – which they regarded as illegal under international law and entirely outside NATO’s defensive remit, and in which they were not consulted – found themselves accused by Trump of disloyalty. ‘I just want their loyalty,’ he told Secretary General Rutte in the Oval Office. ‘We’re so loyal to them, we’re always fighting for them.’ The logic is revealing: American military adventures in the Middle East have become a test of Alliance solidarity, regardless of whether Europe was consulted, regardless of legal authority, regardless of European strategic interests. The demand is not burden-sharing. It is fealty.

Germany’s Chancellor Merz arrived at Ankara having delivered what Berlin de-scribes as its greatest ever rearmament effort. Trump’s pre-summit verdict: Germany’s defence spending was ‘ridiculous.’ The burden-sharing argument, deployed in this manner, is no longer a legitimate grievance. It is an instrument of perpetual dissatisfaction.

THE BURDEN-SHARING ARGUMENT: FAIR COMPLAINT OR BAD FAITH?

It would be dishonest to dismiss the American burden-sharing critique entirely. For decades, prosperous European democracies sheltered beneath an American security umbrella while spending their defence savings on welfare states and export industries. The complaint had substance.

The trajectory has, however, changed materially. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine proved a more effective stimulus to European defence spending than thirty years of American pressure. By 2026, all NATO’s European members meet or exceed the 2% core military spending target – compared with three allies in 2014. European allies and Canada increased core defence expenditure by $139 billion in 2025 alone, a 20% increase in a single year. Secretary General Rutte, who displayed large charts in the Oval Office showing what he called ‘the Trump Trillion’ – the cumulative allied spending increase since 2017 – has pointed to European allies and Canada averaging close to 4% of GDP when the broader definition of security-related expenditure is applied: one that includes infrastructure resilience, cyber, and civil preparedness alongside core military budgets. Core military spending among major European allies remains consi-derably lower – the UK at around 2.3%, France at approximately 2% – but the direction and pace of travel are unambiguous, and the Hague commitment to reach 3.5% in core military spending by 2035 is now the governing target.

The administration’s response to this transformation has been instructive. Rather than welcoming it as vindication, it has shifted the demand from money to loyalty, while simultaneously withdrawing warplanes, destroyers, and submarines from European NATO countries and opening bilateral negotiations with Moscow that trade European interests without European consent. The burden-sharing argument, in this context, is not a policy position. It is a rhetorical instrument in service of a broader extractive strategy.

EXTRACTION: THE PATTERN OF BEHAVIOUR

The word ‘exploitation’ is strong and requires justification. The case rests not on any single episode but on a consistent pattern:

• Security guarantees rendered explicitly conditional on financial compliance, under-mining the deterrent logic on which European security has rested since 1949.

• Bilateral negotiations with Russia in which European territorial interests were traded without European consent or advance notification.

• The demand for participation in the Iran war as a test of Alliance loyalty, with no prior consultation and no legal basis under the Washington Treaty.

• Planned withdrawal of US forces from Germany following public criticism of Chancellor Merz, and contingent force posture decisions tied to individual allies’ spending compliance.

• Arms sales pressure: the expectation that European rearmament will preferen-tially benefit American defence contractors, with pressure applied against European procurement programmes. The F-35 offer to Turkey, floated at Ankara, sits within this pattern – geopolitically disruptive, commercially advantageous.

• Economic coercion – tariffs, technology restrictions, investment pressure – de-ployed against allied states simultaneously with demands for increased defence contributions.

Taken individually, any of these might be dismissed as a single administration’s tactical over-reach. Taken together, and set against the Ankara evidence that European rearmament is accelerating regardless, they describe a consistent strategic logic: the maximisation of American leverage from the Alliance relationship at the cost of the Alliance’s collective integrity.

ANKARA AND THE ACCELERATION

The 2026 Ankara Summit has confirmed rather than complicated the thesis. The Declaration, signed by all 32 allies including the United States, reaffirms an ‘ironclad’ Article 5 commitment and names Russia as a ‘long-term threat to Euro-Atlantic security and stability.’ More than $50 billion in new procurements were announced, alongside €70 billion pledged in military assistance to Ukraine for 2026 with equivalent levels affirmed for 2027. Three further developments deserve particular attention.

The European Industrial Turn

Rutte announced at the Defence Industry Forum that allies would be announcing ‘tens of billions’ in new defence contracts, with confirmed packages including $12.8 billion in Arctic satellite communications and GlobalEye, Airbus, and Triton surveillance systems. The significant detail is the destination of those contracts: European companies. The rearmament that Trump’s pressure accelerated is being built on European industrial capacity. American defence contractors, who might reasonably have expected to be the primary beneficiaries of the largest European rearmament since the Cold War, are watching a European defence industrial base develop with its own logic, its own supply chains, and its own long-term strategic implications. This is the unintended consequence. Trump demanded European spending; Europe is spending, but increasingly on Europe.

The Command Restructure

February 2026 brought a formal restructuring of NATO’s command architecture that would have been unthinkable five years ago. The United Kingdom will take command of Joint Force Command Norfolk – a four-star command previously always led by an American officer – with Lieutenant General Nick Perry assuming command in September 2026, the first British officer ever to hold the role. Italy takes Joint Force Command Naples. Germany and Poland share Joint Force Command Brunssum on rotation. The result: all three of NATO’s operational-level four-star commands will be led by Europeans.

Simultaneously, the Royal Navy has assumed command of NATO’s Allied Reaction Force Maritime, with HMS Queen Elizabeth – returned to service in May 2026 after her Rosyth refit – as flagship. The United States retains SACEUR and the three theatre com-ponent commands. The architecture of the Alliance is being quietly but systematically Europeanised.

The Pentagon frames this as burden-sharing fulfilled. European defence planners read it differently: as the first structural step toward an Alliance that can function, at operational level, without American leadership. The ambiguity is deliberate. The direction of travel is not.

Article 5 – Ironclad on Paper

The Ankara Declaration’s ‘ironclad’ Article 5 commitment, signed off by all 32 allies, is the formally reassuring headline. The context is less reassuring: the same president who signed the declaration has repeatedly cast doubt on its meaning, attached financial conditions to its application, and simultaneously withdrew forces from the European theatre. The Declaration is also notably brief by the standards of recent summits – a shorter communiqué reflects harder negotiations and less agreed substance. A com-mitment that requires constant reaffirmation has already, by definition, been weakened. The price Europeans paid for the Article 5 language was inclusion of Trump’s Iran formulation: allies ‘reiterate that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon’ and call for freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz. The transactional character of the Alliance is now written into its own declaration.

WHAT EUROPE MUST NOW DO

The Ankara evidence, combined with the structural analysis above, points toward a set of requirements that are no longer aspirational. They are urgent.

Build the Industrial Base – and Keep It European

The billions in European defence contracts announced at Ankara represent a strategic opportunity as much as a security necessity. The temptation to default to American systems – proven, interoperable, politically safe – must be resisted where European alternatives exist or can be developed. EDIP, the European Defence Industry Programme, and associated EU instruments provide the framework. The political will to use them, against American commercial pressure, is the variable. Ankara suggests that will is hardening.

Operationalise the Command Restructure

The transfer of JFC Norfolk, JFC Naples, and JFC Brunssum to European command is a structural fact, not yet an operational reality. European headquarters need the doctrine, the planning capacity, the intelligence architecture, and the political mandate to function independently if required. The UK’s assumption of JFC Norfolk is particu-larly significant: Norfolk commands NATO’s Atlantic and Arctic approaches, including the GIUK gap that is central to any Russian naval challenge. A British officer commanding that space, with European political backing, represents a qualitative shift in European strategic weight.

Advance the Nuclear Conversation

The most consequential and most difficult European debate concerns deterrence. President Macron’s 2026 Île Longue speech, offering ‘strategic dialogue’ with European partners on the role of the French deterrent, was the most significant nuclear policy statement from a European leader since de Gaulle. The obstacles remain formidable: German constitutional constraints, the non-proliferation architecture, cost, and the complexity of extended deterrence arrangements. But the conversation is happening, driven by doubt about the American guarantee, in a way that would have been politically impossible five years ago. It must continue, and it must move from dialogue toward architecture.

Institutionalise, Not Just Spend

Money without institutional coherence produces expensive fragmentation. The risk of the current European rearmament surge is that thirty-two national procure-ment programmes, however generously funded, produce thirty-two different systems with limited interoperability and no common strategic logic. The EU’s emerging role in defence – contested, imperfect, but real – must be the framework through which common capability requirements are set, joint procurement is negotiated, and European strategic priorities are established. NATO and EU structures are complementary, not competitive. Treating them as such is the political work of the next five years.

THE THIRD FORCE QUESTION

This paper was commissioned for an issue of GeoPolitica examining the competition between the United States and China. That context is not peripheral to the NATO analysis. It is central to it.

The dominant frame of international relations in the 2020s is bipolar: Washington versus Beijing, with every other actor positioned relative to that axis. Europe has, by default, been assumed to sit firmly within the American pole – a subordinate partner whose strategic choices are made in Washington and whose defence is guaranteed from across the Atlantic. The analysis above suggests that assumption is becoming untenable, not because Europe has chosen to abandon it, but because the United States is revising the terms under which it applies.

The question that follows is whether European strategic coherence – which Europe has consistently failed to generate voluntarily over seventy years – can be forged involuntarily, under American pressure. The early evidence from 2025 and 2026 is cautiously affirmative. The speed of the European rearmament response, the emergence of common EU defence instruments, the restructuring of NATO’s command architecture, and the beginning of a serious nuclear conversation all point toward a Europe that is, haltingly, developing the attributes of strategic autonomy.

If that trajectory continues – and it is not guaranteed – the bipolar frame will require revision. A Europe capable of independent deterrence, with its own industrial base, its own command architecture, and its own nuclear conversation, is not a subor-dinate partner. It is a third pole: not hostile to either Washington or Beijing, but not subordinate to either, and capable of shaping the international order rather than merely reacting to it.

Donald Trump set out to extract maximum value from the Alliance he inherited. He may, as an unintended consequence, have done more to create European strategic autonomy than any amount of European political will could have achieved unaided. Whether Europe proves capable of seizing that moment – building institutions that outlast the current American administration and the current European rearmament panic – is the question that will define the continent’s strategic trajectory for the next generation.

It is too early to answer it. Ankara, however, suggests the question is no longer hypothetical.