It was a crisis meeting that NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, walked into at the White House on Wednesday.
A desperate attempt at damage control in an alliance increasingly threatened from within.
Because it is not an external enemy but the alliance’s indispensable cornerstone — the United States — that is causing the tremors.
In the weeks leading up to the meeting, Donald Trump once again threatened to pull the United States out of NATO, citing the fact that several European allies had refused to take part in the war against Iran.
Nothing suggests the meeting changed anything.
Quite the opposite.
»NATO wasn’t there when we needed them, and they won’t be there if we need them again. Remember Greenland, that big, poorly run, piece of ice!!!«, Donald Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, after meeting with Mark Rutte.
In that way, Greenland was once again pulled in as a political pressure point — and as a piece in Trump’s assessment of the alliance’s value. It puts NATO in one of its most serious crises in recent history and underscores that the president has not abandoned his ambitions in the Arctic.
An alliance on American terms
At the heart of the conflict is what NATO actually is.
Trump expects political and military backing — even for conflicts the United States itself chooses to engage in. But when several European countries declined to support an American effort in the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important oil arteries, Trump read it as disloyalty.
But NATO is a defensive alliance. Its job is to protect member states from attack — not automatically to endorse American military operations around the world.
That Trump makes that demand anyway stems from his fundamentally transactional view of politics. NATO is a tool to advance his own interests.
That approach becomes even clearer in his repeated linkage between NATO and Greenland. Earlier this week, Trump drew the connection explicitly. He first dismissed NATO as a »paper tiger«, then continued:
»’It all began with, if you want to know the truth, Greenland. We want Greenland. They don’t want to give it to us. And I said ’bye bye’«.
»It’s quite sad«
If the United States doesn’t get its way, Trump calls the value of the entire alliance into question.
NATO has invoked Article 5 — the alliance’s collective defense guarantee — only once in its history, and that was after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when the member countries came to America’s aid.
Even so, Trump maintains the narrative of an alliance in which the United States is being taken advantage of by its partners.
That was also made clear just hours before the meeting, when the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, repeated the message:
»It’s quite sad that NATO turned their backs on the American people over the course of the last six weeks, when it’s the American people who have been funding their defence«.
At the same time, she left open the most far-reaching possibility: an American break with the alliance that has been the backbone of the Western security order since 1949:
»It’s something the president has talked about, and I think it’s something the president will discuss in a couple of hours with Secretary General Rutte«.
Speaking to CNN, Mark Rutte would neither confirm nor deny whether Donald Trump had mentioned a possible American withdrawal from NATO — which in itself could suggest the question was on the table.
Good luck, Rutte
On CNN, Rutte described the conversation as »very honest« and »very open« between »two good friends«. At the same time, he did not conceal that Trump was clearly disappointed with allies who have not sufficiently supported the United States and Israel in the war with Iran, adding that he could understand the president’s point.
So far, Rutte has chosen a strategy of trying to keep Trump inside the alliance through accommodation — at times bordering on the obsequious, as when he publicly referred to him as daddy.
It is a strategy that may buy time.
But it is unlikely to change the trajectory.
Because for Donald Trump, hostility toward NATO is neither new nor temporary — it is rooted in his criticism of U.S. alliances from the 1980s and became concrete in his first presidential term.
According to NATO’s former secretary general Jens Stoltenberg, the concern at the time was real: that the United States could leave the alliance. In his memoir, he describes how in 2018 they seriously prepared for such a scenario.
Congress later tried to close the loophole with a law meant to prevent a president from unilaterally withdrawing the United States from NATO. A withdrawal requires either a two-thirds majority in the Senate or a separate law passed by Congress.
The law was passed in 2023 with broad support and was championed, among others, by then-Senator Marco Rubio, who is now Trump’s secretary of state.
A collapse of credibility
But the decisive question is not whether Donald Trump formally tries to leave NATO.
The decisive question is whether he makes the alliance no longer credible.
The core is Article 5 — the musketeers’ oath: an attack on one is an attack on all. But it rests on a political premise: that the United States will, in fact, honor its promise.
That premise can no longer be taken for granted.
The paradox is clear: Trump’s pressure — together with Russia’s war in Ukraine — has pushed Europe to do what American presidents have demanded for years: rearm and take greater responsibility.
That gave him a historic opportunity to strengthen NATO like few before him.
But just as Europe begins to deliver, Trump is undermining the very foundation.
»Alliances like NATO are valuable because of the things we don’t say, because of the trust behind it«, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said last week.
»If you create doubts every day about your commitment, you empty (NATO, ed.) of its substance«.
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