During the recent 2026 NATO Summit in Ankara, Turkey, tensions between U.S. President Donald Trump and longtime European allies were obvious. Prominent military veterans like retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling and retired U.S. Navy Admiral William McRaven believe that Trump fails to see the value of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) — a view shared by former BBC reporter Jon Sopel. In a pessimistic article for the UK-based i Paper, the British reporter has a dire warning for fellow Europeans: We’re on our own.
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Sopel points out that Trump is hardly the first U.S. president to say that European NATO members needed to increase their military spending. The difference, according to Sopel, is that Barack Obama and other former U.S. presidents, unlike Trump, saw NATO as vitally important to U.S. interests. In 2015, for example, Obama military officials strongly advised against defense spending cuts in the UK.
“The point is, there is nothing new about U.S. presidents feeling aggravated, irked, infuriated by European leaders taking the U.S. for granted when it comes to NATO spending,” Sopel explains in the i Paper. “The way it looks in the U.S. is that the security umbrella is something that America pays for and from which Europe benefits. The difference between now and … 11 years ago is that Donald Trump doesn’t really see what NATO is for and cares about it even less. Obama never doubted the vital role the alliance played in keeping the European continent safe from the wars of the 20th Century that claimed the lives of so many young Americans. The ambivalence towards NATO during Trump’s first term, when he casually contemplated withdrawal and had to be talked down, has become downright hostility in the second — as we saw at the summit in Turkey, when he declared himself ‘not happy’ with the alliance.”
U.S. military experts themselves, Sopel laments, are warning that Trump is inflicting major harm on longtime post-World War 2 alliances.
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“Look at the language he’s used since launching his ill-fated war against Iran,” Sopel writes. “NATO was a ‘paper tiger.’ Why? Because although Trump never once consulted any of his NATO allies about his planned attack, nor went through anything bothersome like getting UN approval, he felt enraged that other NATO forces didn’t immediately get behind him. Troubling him with teeny-weeny details like NATO being a defensive organization, not an offensive one, would just incur more wrath.”
The British journalist continues, “What’s the point of Article 5, he cried — the bit in the charter which declares that an attack on one member nation is an attack on all? Well, America hadn’t been attacked. America did the attacking. Indeed, the only time that Article 5 has been invoked was by the U.S. itself, back in 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. NATO rallied. But a quarter of a century on from that dreadful day, would America come to our aid if we were attacked? The question has so much more resonance now following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its ever more aggressive posture towards the Baltic states and East European neighbors.”
Thanks to Trump, Sopel warns, the U.S. no longer has Europe’s back militarily.
“So, what of the future?” Sopel writes. “The best that we can hope for is that, to state the bleedin’ obvious, we’re not attacked. Or that, if we are, it is after Trump has gone, defense spending across the continent has risen to a level that Britain and Western Europe are better able to fend for themselves, and America has snapped back to a more sympathetic embrace and understanding. But that is not a defense posture. That is wing-and-a-prayer stuff. The reality is we’d better get used to the idea that America can’t be relied on to come to our rescue.”
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