Donald Trump’s statement that he would not defend some NATO allies from attack got plenty of attention, but a PNW professor dismissed it as campaign rhetoric.
“Hypothetically, if something were to happen, if Trump is the president at that time, would he really ignore the United States’ obligation to defend fellow NATO countries because of this failure to meet the two percent? My best guess, at this point, is no,” said Yu Ouyang, an associate professor of Political Science. “There is a difference between political rhetoric on the campaign trail versus what a person may do if elected to be president.”
Trump recently told a campaign rally crowd that he would not defend NATO allies from Russia if they had not contributed what he deems to be their fair share in defense spending.
The statement attracted immediate backlash. President Joseph Biden said Trump was giving Putin a “greenlight for more war”. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the threats put foreign and American soldiers in danger.
Ouyang, who has followed the story closely, said Trump’s statement was designed to be controversial to attract attention.
“The media generally pays a lot of attention to Trump and what he says on the campaign trail,” said Ouyang. “Especially when he says something exceptionally controversial like the statement about NATO funding. It’s hard not to know about it.”
NATO was created as a collective security system in 1949, operating as a check on the threat posed by the Soviet Union, now Russia. Its independent member states agree to defend each other against attacks by third parties.
NATO members do not pay dues to be part of the alliance, but they do commit to spending at least 2% of their gross domestic product on defense. That commitment is a guideline, not a requirement. Eleven of the 39 NATO members met or exceeded the 2% commitment last year. Most of those countries share a border with Russia.
The United States, which spends about 3.49% of its GDP on defense, ranked second behind Poland in the NATO alliance. But the $860 billion U.S. defense budget is more than double that of all other NATO allies combined.
NATO criticism has been a focal point of Trump’s campaign even going back to his presidency. At a NATO summit meeting in 2018, then President Trump told multiple top national security officials that he did not see any advantage for America remaining a part of the alliance.
But Ouyang said concerns about the U.S. abandoning NATO allies are unfounded.
“Even if Trump gets reelected as president, will we ever see a possibility of the U.S. pulling out of NATO entirely? I don’t think so,” he said.
“When Trump was president he had made a number of comments and through his interactions with NATO countries made it clear he was not pleased that the U.S. spends quite a bit more on military spending than other NATO countries,” said Ouyang. “I think his comments are his opinions, but there are consequences of not defending fellow NATO countries.
“If, God forbid, we’re put in that hypothetical scenario where Russia or somebody else were to attack a NATO country, I think that, whether he wanted to or not, Trump may not have a true choice in defending them,” Ouyang said.
“There could be a lot of noise or threats. He did that when he was in office the first time. We don’t expect him to do anything different the second time,” he said. “If anything, we expect him to heighten up the amount of punitiveness that he puts out there.”