What happens to Nato if the US steps back?
The American military has been the alliance’s bedrock. But shifting US priorities, including in the Middle East, are putting new pressure on European allies
Henry Foy in Brussels, Ben Hall in London, Leila Abboud in Paris and Anne-Sylvaine Chassany and Laura Pitel in Berlin
Clockwise from Donald Trump: Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte, vice-president of the European Commission Kaja Kallas, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz © FT montage/Getty ImagesIn the lead-up to this week’s Nato summit, European capitals have been struggling to get a straight answer from Washington: is the US planning to pull any of its troops and weapons out of Europe, or not?
For eight decades, the might of the American military has provided the bedrock of Europe’s defence — and a pledge from the White House to defend all of its Nato allies on the continent has represented the ultimate security guarantee.
President Donald Trump, who before Saturday’s bombing of Iran had been due to attend the summit in The Hague, has placed a price on Nato’s future: each ally must spend 5 per cent of their GDP on defence.
This commitment also applies to the US.
The core focus of the two-day gathering of the alliance’s 32 national leaders that begins on Tuesday will be on meeting that demand, convincing Trump that Nato is trustworthy, avoiding any conflagration with the mercurial US leader and breathing a collective sigh of relief when his plane departs for home.
Yet European leaders are more optimistic than they were four months ago, when Trump berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office before cutting off aid to Kyiv, leaving many of them appalled.
German chancellor Friedrich Merz came away from a White House meeting earlier this month professing “absolutely no doubt” the US government was sticking to the alliance.
Above all, Nato members, skilfully corralled by the organisations’s secretary-general Mark Rutte have more or less agreed in advance to the 5 per cent target — although Spain says it has secured a last-minute opt-out.
Trump’s decision to take military action against Iran, despite having campaigned against new interventions overseas, is the latest sign that his foreign policy could be more fluid than it might have appeared in the early days of his second term — and of how events elsewhere can drive decisions in the White House.
But ensuring Trump, a longtime Nato sceptic, does not repeat his 2018 summit performance when he threatened to withdraw the US from the alliance is only a short-term fix, one that delays a deeper, longer-term question: is the US military ultimately leaving the continent, and how can Europe replace it?
“What worries me is the debate over the US presence in Europe will take place after the summit, when the summit is supposed to sort of anchor the defence pledge.
So the Europeans don’t know what they’re signing up for,” says Camille Grand, a former Nato assistant secretary-general.
“The [US] administration is leaving all its options open.”
Trump, like Joe Biden before him, has made clear that the US needs to recalibrate its overseas military focus towards Asia, and that weapons, manpower and capabilities in Europe will need to be redeployed.
The new intervention in Iran could potentially add to those pressures.
As US defence secretary Pete Hegseth put it at his first meeting with his Nato counterparts in Brussels in February, “stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe”.
Sustaining the alliance, he added, would “require our European allies to step into the arena and take ownership of conventional security on the continent”.
Hegseth has ordered the Pentagon to draw up a new national defence strategy, due later this summer, focused on strengthening homeland defence and deterrence of China.
US officials have so far not provided their European allies with any formal plan or timeline for that shift, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Washington must first produce its own defence strategy later this summer followed by a review of its force posture.
Nato head Mark Rutte, right, has persuaded alliance members to increase spending after US defence secretary Pete Hegseth said America could no longer be primarily focused on the security of Europe © Omar Havana/Getty ImagesIn the absence of that road map, European leaders know that they will be agreeing to spend more on their own weapons and capabilities, but have no idea which will be needed first to replace US assets.
European capitals are also acutely aware of Trump’s leverage in other areas, such as his threat to impose 50 per cent tariffs on EU goods if Brussels does not cut a trade deal with him, and worry that he will conflate the issues.
Many are also scarred by vice-president JD Vance’s implied threat, made at the Munich Security Conference in February, that if European governments did not accommodate more rightwing or Maga-like viewpoints “there is nothing America can do for you” in terms of security.
As well as sign off on new spending plans, Nato leaders will also endorse new battle plans and capability commitments.
This planning process, which started in 2022, assumes a 30 per cent increase in European efforts to defend the continent.
But it is also premised on the US military footprint in Europe remaining the same, which, as one French military official admits, has a major question mark hanging over it.
“The US signed off on the plans, but we simply do not know if they might come back in a few months or a year and say, actually we’re changing the footprint of our forces in Europe, so you guys will have to do more,” the official tells the FT.
“This is just unknowable at this point and it cannot be planned for.”
Trump first demanded that all Nato allies raise their defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP soon after his election win, threatening in private that this was what continued US protection would cost.
After his inauguration, the proposal became official.
Trump called for an “equalisation” of defence spending between the US and the rest, even as his administration repeatedly vowed that the US would stand by its mutual defence commitments to Nato allies.
Devised by Rutte with Trump’s blessing, Nato leaders will all sign up to a pledge to hit the 5 per cent spending level by 2035.
That will consist of spending on core defence capabilities worth 3.5 per cent of GDP, and spending on related areas including cyber security and infrastructure worth an additional 1.5 per cent.
“These targets describe what capabilities allies need to invest in over the coming years.
From our air defence and fighter jets, to tanks, drones, logistics and of course personnel,” Rutte said last week.
“The 3.5 [per cent] core defence spending is really rooted now in this whole Nato defence planning process.”
At first glance, Trump’s fiscal shakedown of Europe and his demand for “equalisation” would appear to neatly match calls from some European leaders, led by French President Emmanuel Macron, for the continent’s armies to increase their “strategic autonomy”.
But that proposed significant bolstering of the so-called European pillar inside the alliance is riddled with fiendishly complicated questions due to the scale of the reliance on the US, and the key role it plays in not only backstopping, supplementing and supplying all of the alliance’s armies, but also co-ordinating and commanding them.
“There is no European pillar.
This is an empty phrase,” says Carlo Masala, a professor of international politics at Bundeswehr University in Munich.
“Nato is an integrated military command structure, like a wheel.
The European forces are like the spokes. And the US is the hub which ties them all together and makes sure the wheel can run.
Who is going to replace this function?”
Without a replacement for the role the US has been playing for decades, adds Masala, “Nato moves from a modern alliance with an integrated military command structure to a kind of classical alliance with a mutual defence commitment”.
With its Gaullist roots, France has long had a particular relationship with Nato.
It is a key founding member, but also one that jealously guards its own military independence.
It built its own nuclear weapon so as not to rely on the US, and therefore sits outside the alliance’s nuclear sharing agreement.
France has also maintained homegrown defence contractors instead of buying American-made weapons.
Once marginal — and even considered provocatively anti-American by some in Europe — Macron’s position on defence sovereignty is now becoming consensus.
This shift in mindset has been spurred on by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its persistent threat to eastern Nato members, but also Trump’s questioning of the transatlantic alliance’s importance.
Brussels has also waded in to help make the case for increased defence spending among its member states.
“This year, Russia is spending more on defence than on its own healthcare, education and social policy combined.
This is a long-term plan for long-term aggression,” warned Kaja Kallas, vice-president of the European Commission, during a debate ahead of the Nato summit.
She described the threat to transatlantic unity and security as “a problem for us all”.
But unlike some European allies, France does not see a possible American drawdown of its forces as an existential problem, and thinks the region can wean itself off its reliance on the US in the coming decade.
American soldiers disembark during an exercise on the Danube this month to strengthen interoperability between the armed forces of Nato member countries © Daniel Mihailescu/AFP/Getty ImagesThe scale of that task is vast, however.
Beyond some British and French capabilities, European militaries rely almost entirely on the US for so-called strategic enablers.
Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, heavy lift aircraft to move weapons around at short notice, space assets, and command and control operations have long been provided by the US and are expensive and time-consuming to replace.
Officials and analysts assume that much of this would need to be developed, funded and acquired jointly.
Grand, the former Nato official now at the European Council on Foreign Relations, says that making up for a US reduction in troops is “sort of manageable even with a relatively short-time frame” for European capitals.
“[But] if we start looking at critical enablers, even short of nuclear deterrence, there the demands are much higher and the timeframe is at a minimum of a few years, possibly up to a decade.
There the absence of an agreed and co-ordinated plan is much more damaging than for the unilateral withdrawal of a few thousand troops,” she adds.
In other areas of heavy US reliance, such as air and missile defence platforms and long-range strike weapons, many capitals have called on the EU to provide financial support and to help co-ordinate the search for European alternatives.
A recent loan facility set up by Brussels can be spent on weapons if they are jointly procured.
“We’re not creating an EU army, but it’s clear that Brussels and the member states want a stronger European leg inside Nato,” says a senior European official involved in transatlantic negotiations.
“I think you’ll see the EU taking on previously Nato-only competences on things like interoperability, standards and joint procurement.”
In recent months, German defence minister Boris Pistorius has pushed Hegseth, his US counterpart, to provide a “road map” for a US pullback from Europe, according to three people briefed on their discussions.
But this bid to give Berlin and its European allies a concrete timeline for which assets they need to prioritise, and how fast, has irritated other Nato capitals that believe pushing the US to clarify how quickly it plans to withdraw would only create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The result is an inconsistent approach, says the senior European official.
“Engage with the Americans like hell to keep them as close as possible, while at the same time preparing as fast as we can for them to walk away,” the official says.
“Is that crazy?
Yes.
But the whole context is insane.”
That disagreement has underscored the nervousness inside Nato about US planning, and the fear around what a knee-jerk decision by the Trump administration would mean.
Other Nato diplomats privately criticise Pistorius’s outreach, saying the break with his key European allies risks muddying the message to Washington.
But they also say that the longer the US takes to decide, the more time Europe gains to secure political support behind the increased financing and rearmament push.
“European allies in Nato may fear that they could set in motion the very outcome they seek to avoid: the more they plan to replace the US presence, the more excuse they will give US policymakers to leave,” says Giuseppe Spatafora, analyst at the EU Institute for Security Studies.
“If we start making these changes, the Americans will be more inclined to say their withdrawal plan is even more useful because we Europeans are doing it anyway.”
“First, we [must] do nothing that would encourage the Americans to leave, because that’s not in our interest,” says a French diplomat.
“Then, if it becomes inevitable, our main priority is that the Americans are transparent with the other members of the alliance so that the process can be orderly.”
Pistorius has argued that a road map is needed to avoid a sudden and potentially dangerous US withdrawal.
“We all have trauma from Afghanistan,” says a senior German official, referring to the bungled US withdrawal from the country in 2021.
Berlin will play an oversized role in Nato’s future, whatever the US decides to do.
Unlike the UK and France, which are fiscally constrained, Merz is attending his first Nato summit with newfound financial headroom: after relaxing Germany’s constitutional debt limit to allow virtually unlimited borrowing for the military, he has embraced Rutte’s proposal.
“The federal government will provide all the financial resources that the Bundeswehr [Germany’s armed forces] needs to become the strongest conventional army in Europe,” Merz told MPs last month.
While Trump told Merz in the Oval Office earlier this month that the large US military contingent stationed in Germany would remain, in the background, Germany is working on the assumption that the numbers will reduce significantly in the coming years.
Of the roughly 90,000 US troops currently in Europe, about 37,000 are in Germany.
“We have to look reality in the face,” says a German official.
“We shouldn’t count on the same US contingent that they have now.”
Pistorius said earlier this month that Germany’s armed forces — currently made up of 180,000 professional soldiers and already short of its targets — would need to find an additional 50,000 to 60,000 recruits to meet Berlin’s commitments to Nato by the end of the 2030s.
While Pistorius has been eager to ensure that there is a “smooth and synchronised” process in terms of shifting responsibilities from the US to Europe, the German official suggests much will depend on the US.
“The White House will dictate the tempo of this shift — and so will what happens in the world,” the official says, pointing to increased Chinese aggression in the Pacific as one variable that could speed things up.
Nato officials are sure of one thing: even in the best-case scenario — in which Trump leaves The Hague with 31 new spending commitments and declares the alliance “more powerful than ever” — its future, and America’s role in it, remains uncertain.
“The [transatlantic] relationship is fundamentally different, but not everyone takes that for what it is,” says Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s former foreign minister.
“Many of the eastern flank countries are even less realistic about the change than western Europe.
Many are still hoping for the better outcomes rather than preparing for the most likely ones.”
Rutte, with the unenviable job of convincing allies to agree to ambitious investment and spending plans while also unaware of Washington’s exact plans for its European future, is arguing that regardless of Trump’s ultimate decision, it is in Europe’s interest to build its own self-reliance.
A training exercise off western France this month. Unlike some European allies, France, which has its own nuclear weapons and defence contractors, does not see a possible US drawdown of its forces as an existential problem © Loic Venance/AFP/Getty Images“We don’t have to do this because of an audience of one.
We have to do this to keep 1bn people safe,” Rutte said last week.
But Europe must get its act together quickly, experts suggest.
“The US is not interested in a road map; they want to have a free hand, says Masala, the university professor.
“That’s why speed is important now.
That Europe gets together, spends on its defence, co-ordinates its procurement policies, and has a plan for who’s going to buy what.”
He adds: “All the Europeans are looking at the US like the rabbit looks at the snake . . . hoping that the snake won’t bite them.”
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