George Hu. Originally published in Spring 2018.

Over the course of the last half decade, the challenges facing NATO have drastically multiplied. As numerous countries in the alliance were recovering from the worst of the 2008 recession and European sovereign debt crisis, external events—including the Arab Spring, Mediterranean migrant crisis, Syrian Civil War, and Russian aggression in Ukraine—have destabilized the Southern and Eastern flanks of the alliance. Despite the worrying developments, NATO has nevertheless been able to meet such challenges with general resolve and common unity for much of the decade. For example, in response to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the alliance promptly increased its military presence on its eastern flank while many member nations swiftly acted to place sanctions on Russian products. However, populist movements that have disrupted multiple NATO member states since 2015 signal that NATO’s internal unity can no longer be taken for granted.

As the alliance approaches its 70th year of existence in 2019, the growing internal rifts between NATO’s individual member states have begun to overshadow threats from abroad. While semi-autocratic, illiberal leaders including Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and Andrzej Duda in Poland have already posed threats to the internal unity of NATO, NATO’s recent internal disunity has been exacerbated most drastically after the election of Donald Trump as US President in 2016.

Trump is the first US President to openly question the country’s commitment to NATO, and he has vacillated over the degree of US commitment to the organization. Trump’s ambivalent stance on the alliance has been well documented; having called NATO obsolete during the 2016 campaign, Trump temporarily relabeled the alliance as “no longer obsolete” in April 2017 after receiving assurances of its continued involvement in Syria and Iraq against ISIL. Only one month later, however, Trump partially reverted to his previous stance, berating European leaders for failing to fulfill NATO’s defense spending target. Although his most condemning remarks about the alliance have not resulted in any cataclysmic disintegration, his continued criticism of numerous NATO members has only increased internal disunity and instability.

While United States Congress and military leadership have not acted upon Trump’s rhetoric, his ambiguous attitude has nonetheless eroded other member nations’ trust in the US commitment to the alliance. For example, in May 2017 German chancellor Angela Merkel expressed her concerns in response to Trump’s criticism of NATO, remarking that “the times in which we could completely depend on others are, to a certain extent, over… We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands.” Despite her attempts at nonchalance, Merkel’s statement marks a radical departure from post World War II German and European foreign policy, which had previously treated the transatlantic partnership with the United States as an immutable constant. French President Emmanuel Macron echoed Merkel’s position in calling for further European integration, including the creation of a pan-European army and defense budget. This indicates European leaders’ growing inclination to seek military self-reliance independent of the United States. Although EU leaders such as Macron and Merkel remain staunch supporters of NATO, their proposed plans and statements can be seen as reactions to the newfound tension and dissonance brewing within the transatlantic alliance.

In addition to unnerving certain European leaders, Trump’s rhetoric has shown the possibility of exacerbating the ideological division between Western and Eastern European NATO member states. This possibility was most vividly displayed during Trump’s speech in Warsaw on July 6, 2017. The speech itself was one of Trump’s relatively more proper and politically correct speeches, but it nevertheless provoked controversy and dissent along political lines. While conservatives including Niall Ferguson praised the speech as a staunch defense of Western values, progressives and liberals largely denounced the speech as a rallying cry for alt-right “blood and soil” ideology. Notwithstanding the possibility of the political left exaggerating the implications of Trump’s speeches, Trump’s words did subtly invoke certain incendiary undertones for a speech intended to salute Western civilization and its unity. David Frum of the Atlantic notes, “Trump traveled to Warsaw to praise and reward a Polish government that all America’s other leading allies in Europe have been reproving for its suppression of free media and politicization of its legal system.” President Trump not only disregarded recent illiberal actions by the Polish government but also praised the regime’s new Three Seas initiative (TSI), a move that has been met with unease in Germany, Brussels, and much of Western Europe. Trump’s words can thus potentially inflame tensions between the more liberal states of Western and Central Europe and the less liberal ones in the East even further.

Even without Trump’s influence, tensions between European NATO members are running high. As Poland’s recent authoritarian tendencies and leadership of the TSI illustrate, an ideological divide has grown between Western and Eastern Europe. Founded as a forum of Eastern European states, the TSI aims to bolster infrastructure and production in the energy sector throughout the region. Though pro-NATO voices have noted the initiative’s beneficial potential to reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian energy imports, many in Western Europe see the TSI as, borrowing the words of F. William Engdahl, “a thinly-veiled geopolitical attempt” to counter German influence in Eastern Europe. While Poland hopes to replace Russia as Europe’s new gas hub through the TSI, many Western European leaders worry that reliance on Polish and TSI gas imports will only strengthen Poland’s authoritarian rule and its hostile presence in the European Union. In addition, the leaders of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey––all NATO member states––have all sought warmer relations with Russia in past years. These developments could further hinder the alliance’s internal unity and effectiveness in the event of Russian aggression.

With increasingly authoritarian regimes in Poland and Hungary, an inconsistent US policy towards transatlantic alliance, and an increasingly defiant Eastern Europe challenging the alliance’s internal peace, NATO faces internal division as its most potent threat. Several measures can be taken by member states to overcome these challenges and to ensure the continued vitality of the alliance. For more liberal member states including France and Germany, increasing the defense spending to 2 percent of GDP could be a viable first step. Doing so would not only bolster the alliance’s military capabilities in Europe but also address a long-standing US complaint forcefully aggrandized by Trump. Eastern European states including Poland and Hungary should take measures to maintain working relations with both their Western neighbors and the United States. For all of Duda’s and Orbán’s nationalist rhetoric, their countries stand most at threat from the combination of internal NATO instability and Russia. For the United States, military leadership should continue its affirmation of US support for the alliance and the collective defense clause of Article V, especially when the president proves incapable of consistently doing so. By recognizing the member states’ common geopolitical interests, NATO can overcome current challenges and ensure its continued vitality.