Trump's Iranian miscalculations aren't NATO's obligation
The North Atlantic Treaty is a geographically limited, defensive agreement.
Donald Trump got one big thing right about NATO: European democracies aren’t investing enough in their security.
Of course, this was far from an original insight. A procession of predecessors in the Oval Office had the same complaint. Nevertheless, it is fair to at least partially credit Trump’s belligerence about the matter for a change in direction. Higher defense expenditures started even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and doubts about American reliability concentrated minds on the continent about their vulnerability.
However, Trump also gets numerous big things wrong about NATO, some of which are, or should be, a national embarrassment for the United States.
Trump alternates between saying that the United States doesn’t need NATO allies in his war against Iran and castigating them for not participating.
Trump and Israel made a unilateral decision to engage in an extensive bombing campaign on Iran without prior consultation with NATO and without U.N. sanction. Trump clearly and seriously miscalculated Iran’s response and the economic consequences for the region and the world. And now he berates NATO allies for not taking on a military task – clearing the Strait of Hormuz – that his own Navy hasn’t been willing to take on.
This, in itself, is stunningly … well, cheeky is the term that comes to mind. More importantly, it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the North Atlantic Treaty and the true mutual commitments made thereunder.
The North Atlantic Treaty is a defensive agreement. And it is geographically limited.
In Article 5, the “Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all ….” The treaty commits all signatories to aid the attacked member “including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area”.
Article 6 further defines an armed attack triggering the mutual aid commitment as one occurring “on the territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America”.
Trump’s war on Iran is offensive, not defensive. Irrespective of whether Iran’s potential threat to the United States warranted preemptive action (I don’t think it did), Iran hadn’t attacked the United States on our sovereign territory in North America. This conflict isn’t covered by the mutual aid obligations of the North Atlantic Treaty, irrespective of how loose an interpretation is applied to its provisions.
Trump now threatens to withdraw the United States from NATO, alleging that we always are there to protect the European members but they are never there for us. This gets the NATO history exactly backwards.
Article 5 has been triggered only once in NATO’s 76-year history. And it wasn’t to defend a European member who had been attacked. There has not been such an attack on a European member since the formation of the alliance, one of the longest stretches of peace the continent has ever experienced. As a deterrent force, NATO has been exceptionally successful.
Now, this success is due to the disproportionate commitment to the continent’s defense borne by the United States. A rebalancing of the burden is long overdue.
However, that disproportionate burden hasn’t resulted in actual combat obligations. When the United States has opted to engage in military action in non-NATO countries in the region, it was because we made an independent decision that doing so was in our security interests, not because we were obligated to do so under the North Atlantic Treaty.
The only time the Article 5 mutual defense commitment has been triggered was after al-Qaida’s terrorist attacks on the United States on 9/11. That was an attack on U.S. soil. European members were the moving parties in triggering the mutual aid commitment.
The United States fought two wars after the 9/11 attacks, in Afghanistan and Iraq. NATO allies participated in both, even though the 9/11 connection was highly tenuous for the Iraq war.
Trump has denigrated the contribution of our NATO allies in those conflicts, claiming they avoided real combat missions. This is arguably the most shameful thing he has done as president. Several NATO allies suffered combat deaths and casualties numbering in the hundreds and even thousands. This is a particular slur on Great Britain, which assumed the primary responsibility for two of the most volatile regions in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Do we really have an American president that ignorant of the actual role our NATO allies served in those conflicts? Or that indifferent to the sacrifices they made in fulfillment of what they regarded as a mutual aid obligation after the United States was attacked?
Trump went to war against Iran with unclear and shifting objectives and rationales. He seriously miscalculated the consequences. With the blockade, I suspect the miscalculations continue. And when his miscalculations became manifest, he lashed out at NATO allies for not engaging in a conflict clearly outside their obligations under the treaty.
The underlying and insuperable problem for Europe is that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance aren’t committed to the Europe the North Atlantic Treaty was crafted to create and protect. That’s something a shift in burden within NATO won’t remedy.
The preamble to the treaty makes clear that it is a commitment among countries sharing common values: “They are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law. They seek to promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area.”
That’s not the Europe Trump and Vance support. The Europe they support is that of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the recently ousted nationalist populist who worked to undermine European cohesion and the ability to take collective action, including in the security arena.
And Trump and Vance don’t believe in a U.S. engagement with the rest of the world based upon the common values articulated in the preamble to the North Atlantic Treaty. Trump, although perhaps not Vance, sees the United States as a self-interested great power in a return to the Great Power geopolitics of the 19th Century. The revival of threats to seize Greenland is all the proof needed.
Now, I don’t believe that the American people support Trump’s great power geopolitics. I believe they continue to want to engage with the rest of the world guided by the preamble’s principles, even if they want other democracies to do more, and the United States to do less, to protect them from threats.
However, until Trump and Vance go the way of Orban, that’s not something other democracies can assume or count on.
Reach Robb at robtrobb@gmail.com.