NATO allies brace for possible Trump 2024 victory

London — Six months to go until the presidential electionAmerica’s NATO allies are planning to increase their defense spending ahead of the potential disruption of a second Donald Trump presidency.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is preparing a financing plan to try to insulate the 75-year-old military partnership from any changing political realities that might affect the alliance, according to Oana Lungescu, who until last year was Stoltenberg’s longtime chief NATO spokeswoman. .

“It is important to have predictability for both allies and Ukraine,” Lungescu told CBS News. “That [plan] relieves the U.S. of some of its organizational burden while maintaining full oversight,” she said.

Stoltenberg proposed a five-year, $107 billion military aid package for Ukraine that would give the broader alliance a more direct role in financing, Reuters report last month.

Under the plan, European allies would create a shared aid fund for Ukraine and increase their contributions to Kiev’s war effort, reducing the considerable funding provided by the US.

Trump’s first term as president demonstrated that the presumptive Republican nominee for 2024 is not afraid to upend the NATO alliance. Trump shocked US allies with his open criticism of the failure of some NATO members to meet defense funding commitments, and the Trump campaign has stated that calling on allies to increase their defense spending is a policy that a future Trump White House would pursue aggressively.

In an emailed statement, Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “President Trump caused our allies to increase their spending on NATO by demanding they pay, but corrupt Joe Biden has again let them take advantage of the American taxpayer.”

“When President Trump returns to the Oval Office, he will restore peace and rebuild American strength and deterrence on the world stage,” Leavitt said.

Lungescu said Stoltenberg’s proposed strategy would address Trump’s complaint that NATO allies are not doing enough to share the economic burden. At the same time, Stoltenberg is trying to protect Ukraine from the kind of crisis delays in Congress – driven largely by House Republicans – who suspended US aid and weapons funding during the first half of the year. NATO allies are also increasing their own individual defense spending, Lungescu told CBS News, although he also noted that American presidents since Eisenhower have criticized NATO partners for not contributing enough.

NATO guidelines say that member states must commit a minimum of 2% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to defense spending to continue to ensure the Alliance’s military readiness.

As NATO itself admits, in terms of GDP, the wealth of its members is “almost equal to that of the USA”. But “non-US Allies together spend less than half what the United States spends on defense,” according to NATO website.

By 2023, only 10 of the other 30 NATO allies had met the 2% spending commitment, excluding the US, although two-thirds of NATO allies are expected to meet the target by the end of the year.

“I think that by the time we get to the NATO summit in Washington in July, we will have updated numbers and we will be in an even better position in terms of significantly increasing defense spending,” predicted Lungescu.

Trump promises not to protect NATO allies who don’t increase their spending

In February, former President Trump said at a campaign rally in South Carolina that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever they want” to NATO allies who do not pay their fair share to the Western military alliance.

Referring to a conversation with an unnamed leader of a NATO country who asked him, “If we don’t pay, will you still protect us,” Trump said he responded, “Absolutely not.”

Since Trump left office in January 2021, his former national security adviser John Bolton has said the former president came close to withdrawing the US from NATO at the end of a 2018 summit and said another Trump term represents an existential threat to the trans economy. -Atlantic Alliance.

“Many [NATO] countries owe us a huge amount of money… The United States has paid and moved forward like no one else,” Trump said at a NATO meeting in July 2018, adding that “something has to be done.”

Will Trump withdraw the US from NATO?

“I think Trump will do significant damage in a second term, damage that in some cases will be irreparable,” Bolton wrote in his 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.” He said he believes Trump intends to withdraw the United States from the alliance if he is re-elected.

“I think he intends to do that,” Bolton wrote. “I think it would be a catastrophic decision for America and a number of other things. It’s a very bleak prospect to see Trump take on a second term.”

“I think actually the greatest danger he faces [Trump] is for NATO is its unpredictability,” Ben Hodges, former commanding general of the U.S. Army in Europe, told CBS News. “The urgency of defense investment is even greater if Trump turns out to be not as trustworthy as anyone else. American president has been. I have been.”

Hodges said one way to ensure NATO allies maintain smooth diplomatic relations with any new Trump administration would be for America’s allies to honor their commitments and increase their defense spending now.

But he is skeptical that Trump will withdraw the U.S. from NATO, pointing to a law passed in Congress last year that prohibits the president from withdrawing from NATO or using any funds appropriated for that purpose without approval from lawmakers.

War game simulates NATO collapse in Trump’s second term

A recent war game run by Finley Grimble, a former UK Ministry of Defense intelligence analyst, concluded that in the event of a second Trump presidency, the alliance would be vulnerable to collapse even if the US did not withdraw from NATO. .

Grimble’s war game presented a scenario where Trump wins the election. The new administration immediately attempts to unilaterally broker a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia. Negotiations fail and Trump then cuts foreign aid to Ukraine.

In the absence of the parliamentary majority needed to formally withdraw the US from the NATO treaty, the Trump White House significantly reduces US participation in NATO exercises, including transferring 50% of the US military presence in Europe to the Indo-Pacific region .

Grimble told CBS News that his analysis showed that such a scenario would leave NATO as an “empty and unprepared shell” while pursuing a policy of NATO “dormancy.”

In Grimble’s war game, Trump takes advantage of the NATO command structure, in which the supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe is always a US officer and is responsible for overall command of NATO military operations.

“NATO has war plans that are ready to be implemented… but the supreme allied commander in Europe would answer to Donald Trump,” Grimble told CBS News.

“You say [the NATO supreme allied commander] stop cooperating, stop implementing plans, and everything falls apart. And that’s what Trump did in the game,” he said.