NATO and Ukraine in the Trump 2.0 Era

EXPERT INTERVIEWS — While the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has long counted the United States as its most generous and loyal members, many NATO nations were deeply concerned about the prospects of a second Trump administration. During his first term, and then again as a candidate for reelection, Trump had for years criticized the alliance for not doing enough to shore up its own defenses, and on more than one occasion threatened to pull the U.S. out of NATO entirely. Experts in the U.S. in Europe, are divided on whether the threats were reckless examples of American isolationism, or pragmatic ways of pressuring NATO’s European members to do more, and lean less heavily on Washington. 

Either way, in the first week of the Trump administration, these issues have come to the fore. Speaking virtually at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday, Trump called for NATO members to raise defense spending to 5% of GDP, saying this “is what it should have been years ago.” He harkened back to his first administration when he demanded alliance members to reach the 2% target: “I insisted that they pay, and they did because the United States was really paying the difference at that time and it was unfair to the United States.”