One month into Operation Epic Fury against the Islamic Republic of Iran, a long-overdue conversation has finally broken into the open: What, exactly, is the enduring rationale for NATO? For decades, this question has been treated in Washington foreign policy circles as heretical. But it isn’t. And to their credit, President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are now saying so plainly.
As Trump recently put it, “They haven’t been friends when we needed them. We’ve never asked them for much. … It’s a one-way street.” Rubio has been similarly blunt: “If NATO is just about us defending Europe if they’re attacked but then denying us basing rights when we need them, that’s not a very good arrangement. … So all that’s going to have to be reexamined.”
They’re spot-on.
At best, America’s European “allies” have spent decades free-riding on the U.S. security umbrella. Despite repeated commitments to meet baseline defense spending targets, many NATO members still under-invest in their militaries and outsource their national defense to American taxpayers. The imbalance is staggering: The United States accounts for the overwhelming majority of NATO’s military capabilities, logistics, and strategic lift. Overall, American taxpayers contribute about 60% of total spending on NATO defense.
At worst, some of these same European allies actively undermine U.S. operations at critical moments. Major Western European countries such as Spain and France have restricted or complicated U.S. use of their airspace during Operation Epic Fury. That is farcical. A so-called alliance in which members obstruct one another’s ability to wage war is not actually an alliance — it is a liability.
This raises the core question: Why, exactly, does NATO exist in the year 2026?
Let’s recall its origins. NATO was founded in 1949 with a clear and urgent mission: to contain and, if necessary, defeat the Soviet Union. That mission was compelling — indeed, existential. Western Europe lay devastated after World War II, and the Soviet threat was real, immediate, and hegemonic.
But that world quite literally no longer exists.
The Soviet Union collapsed three and a half decades ago. The Berlin Wall fell the year I was born. The Cold War is now a relic of history. By any reasonable metric, NATO achieved its raison d’etre by the early 1990s. But instead of declaring victory and recalibrating, the alliance drifted. It expanded ever further into Eastern Europe and shifted its ostensible mission into… well, something.
Simply put, NATO is today an organization in search of a purpose.
You must be logged in to post a comment.