This article is the fourth in a five-part MSNBC Daily series, “The Future of NATO.” With the Trump administration attacking allies, removing troops from European training missions, handing Ukraine’s bargaining chips to Russia and refusing to guarantee European security even as “backstop” — we’re asking five crucial questions about the future of NATO, the U.S. and Europe.
President Donald Trump has never concealed his antipathy toward alliances, particularly NATO. Speaking to reporters at the White House in March, he more forcefully than ever cast doubt on his willingness to defend NATO allies and questioned their commitment to defending the United States.
“Do you think they’re going to come and protect us? They’re supposed to. I’m not so sure,” he mused, adding: “If you’re not going to pay your bills, we’re not going to defend you.” Although the United States allocates roughly 3% of its GDP to military expenditures, Trump has demanded all other NATO member states reach the 5% mark in order to be considered in good standing with him or be effectively abandoned.
So, is NATO’s famous Article 5 collective-defense commitment dead and buried? The traditional reading of it, a cornerstone of U.S. statecraft since World War II, seems to be.
Trump is taking a sledgehammer to 75 years of consensus understanding of Article 5. The article in the North Atlantic Treaty reads, in part, “an armed attack against one or more [members] … shall be considered an attack against them all.”
Article 5 is more complicated, as we shall see, but decades of American strategic thinking, to the gratification of other NATO members, emphasized this passage to make guaranteed collective military self-defense essential to the logic of the NATO alliance. To maintain credibility against Soviet aggression in treaty-specified regions, Cold War-era Washington essentially threw a mighty conventional military (and even nuclear) umbrella over all NATO allies, literally drawing lines that could not be crossed.
The emphasis on the implied commitment of collective self-defense in the initial language of Article 5 was an important element in the surreal but effective “mutual assured destruction” (MAD) understanding between Moscow and Washington. That understanding prevented nuclear or any other direct conflict between the global superpowers during the Cold War, despite decades of intense confrontation and hair-trigger standoffs, especially the Cuban missile crisis.
But there has always been another interpretation of Article 5, which notes that it specifies only that each NATO member state will take “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” Read literally, Article 5 does not commit any state to do anything it does not “deem necessary.”
Trump is taking a sledgehammer to 75 years of consensus understanding of Article 5.
Trump is tapping into the very sentiments of huge numbers of war-weary — and somewhat isolationist — Americans in the wake of World War II. This constituency of Americans impelled Washington to insist on the vague language of Article 5, despite intensive European efforts to make collective defense more mandatory or even automatic. Citing the congressional authority to declare war, among other factors, then-Secretary of State Dean Acheson insisted in 1949 that the Washington treaty “naturally does not mean that the United States would automatically be at war if one of the other signatory nations were the victim of an armed attack.”
Treaties are interpreted according to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. It holds that a treaty “shall be interpreted in good faith in accordance with the ordinary meaning” of its words “and in the light of its object and purpose.” Seventy-five years of consensus surely ought to be sufficient to define Article 5’s objects and purposes.
But once the Cold War ended, it was arguably only a matter of time before some Americans would begin reading Article 5 with an emphasis on the latter passages. It’s a cliché to observe that Trump has turned NATO into a protection racket, but there isn’t a better metaphor. The credibility of NATO providing a collective military and nuclear umbrella is, at best, on life support. A new administration could try to restore the traditional emphasis on the collective defense passages, but Trump let the genie out of the bottle. It’s not going back inside easily, since many Americans think NATO has served its purpose. Ironically, the only time Article 5 was invoked was on behalf of the U.S. after 9/11. But in Trump’s world, what have you done for me lately? The collective-security reading of Article 5 was indispensable to avoiding a superpower conflict and nuclear holocaust, despite the Cold War, and allowing the Washington-led West to essentially prevail in the standoff against the USSR and its own alliance. Yet it’s almost impossible to imagine the Trump administration coming to the military defense of Poland or the Baltic states in the event of Russian aggression, since he paints this as the sad story of a massive rip-off. This is all a huge win for Vladimir Putin and other malefactors, and a disaster for U.S. interests, power and influence. If Trump keeps this up much longer, Article 5 will indeed be dead and buried, and effectively the NATO alliance along with it.
Hussein Ibish
Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. 
