The Evolution of NATO in a Changing World
NATO chief Mark Rutte, who leads the world’s most powerful military alliance, is finding himself sitting in the backseat. France and the United Kingdom are going straight to President Donald Trump to make deals on defense. The two, along with Poland, Germany, and Italy, are forming separate power blocs to tackle the United States’ dwindling support for Ukraine. This means that the former Dutch prime minister, who will meet with Trump at the White House on Thursday, must prove for the sake of the alliance’s future that he — and the nearly eight-decade partnership — are still relevant.
“The real challenge for him now is to become that Trump whisperer and make sure that President Trump and America stay involved in NATO,” said Giedrimas Jeglinskas, chair of the National Security and Defense Committee in Lithuania’s parliament and a former NATO official. “That’s his key job now.”
Redefining Alliances in the Trump Era
In the Trump world order, money talks. NATO relies on its members for funding and weapons. European nations increasingly understand Trump’s transactional approach and are sidestepping Rutte, once seen as a Trump charmer, and heading straight to the commander-in-chief. So now Rutte is too. The former head of government will meet with Trump as he struggles to ensure the alliance can function without Washington — or work with an openly antagonistic administration more attuned to Moscow than Brussels.
“The alliance won’t die,” said a NATO official, ”it will just morph into something else.” The official, like others, was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive issues about the alliance. Rutte, NATO, and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Adapting to New Realities
As Rutte huddles with Trump, diplomats, and NATO generals are gathered in Paris this week for a series of emergency meetings on Ukraine held outside the formal structure of the alliance. And defense chiefs from the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, and Poland are meeting separately in what represents a powerful bloc that excludes the U.S. It’s “a harbinger of this new NATO,” said Stefano Stefanini, a former Italian NATO ambassador. “Mark Rutte’s unenviable task, that none of his predecessors has faced, will be to pull it off.”
NATO has a history of transforming itself to fit the geopolitical moment. Western leaders questioned the alliance’s relevance after the Cold War. So NATO took on new missions by establishing no-fly zones in Bosnia and Libya, put its flag on the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, and started advising Iraqi forces in Baghdad. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea and Donbas regions in 2014, NATO pushed members toward spending 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense. And When Russia launched its full-scale attack in 2022, NATO began developing plans to defend every region of Europe from a Moscow attack.
Challenges and Opportunities Ahead
But NATO has never encountered such an overhaul of global alliances. The Trump administration “is very transactional, so we’re working on forging a relationship on those terms,” said a defense official from a NATO country, who recently visited Washington to meet with counterparts. “We’re staying in very close touch to ensure they know our plans and our needs and how this fits into the relationship.”
The questions about Rutte’s role come as the Pentagon reviews the global presence of U.S. troops, with Europe one place ripe for cuts. European officials, including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, have also hinted loudly at the potential for a nuclear shield on the continent that no longer includes the U.S. NATO has begun revising its defense plans to cut down on the U.S. military assets it will need to defend Europe.
Without the presence of 84,000 U.S. troops in Europe — a number that has ballooned since the Ukraine invasion — the continent would struggle to defend itself against a Russian attack. The subgroup meetings in Paris, which don’t include Rutte, are “almost as important as the preparatory meetings for the creation of NATO in 1949,” said French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot. “Even if it’s not a question of recreating NATO, there are the seeds of genuine change for the alliance.”
NATO’s central nervous system for military operations hinges on U.S.-led commands at Mons, Belgium; Naples, Italy; and in Norfolk, Virginia, the world’s largest naval station. Those commands not only provide firepower but the critical backbone in logistics and communications that the alliance depends on for large exercises or deployments. That reliance on the U.S. for even the most basic elements of Europe’s defense leaves Rutte in an awkward spot.
“He’s in an unenviable position,” said Giuseppe Spatafora, a former NATO official who is now a research analyst at the EU Institute for Security Studies in Brussels. “He needs to say that transatlantic relations are strong when they aren’t. … He probably needs to tell Trump that NATO is lost without him and keep him happy while also showing that allies are spending on defense and buying U.S. weapons.”
But some close to the alliance see a method to Rutte’s fading into the background. “It’s in the DNA of the organization not to create waves,” said one former NATO official. “You kind of want an organization that doesn’t become too loud or get involved in the day-to-day political whiplash.”
