NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, had been in the Oval Office for only a few minutes on April 8 when President Trump leaned back in his chair and asked the question everyone had been dreading: Why should America stay in NATO?
Mr. Trump’s longstanding hostility to the alliance boiled over during his war with Iran. Some European countries had temporarily denied American forces access to their military bases, and many initially declined his plea for help in reopening the Strait of Hormuz. He railed in response, threatening to leave the 77-year-old military alliance for good. Mr. Rutte had gone to Washington to talk him down.
Since taking the reins at NATO in 2024, Mr. Rutte, 59, has faced regular diplomatic explosions ignited by Mr. Trump, who argues the Europeans are free-riding, fair-weather friends. In response, Mr. Rutte, a former Dutch prime minister, has pursued a simple strategy to save the alliance: Placate Mr. Trump in public and private, then use his threats to push European countries to build up their atrophied militaries. Ideally, a fairer division of costs will keep America in the alliance, the thinking goes. If not, at least Europe will be able to defend itself.
At last year’s summit in The Hague, Mr. Rutte persuaded the Europeans to spend more on their militaries. Now his challenge is to get them to spend it in ways that will bind the alliance closer together, strategically and practically. Having once again mollified Mr. Trump, Mr. Rutte will get his next chance when the leaders of NATO’s 32 countries meet this week in Ankara, Turkey.
So far, the perennially optimistic Mr. Rutte keeps running into the same European shortcomings that have bedeviled the alliance for decades — industrial protectionism, nationalist distrust and an instinct to blame America for everything. France and Germany can’t even agree to work together on traditional platforms such as jets and air defenses. How will they effectively join forces on new weapons, like air and sea drones? As they dither, the Europeans’ historical inability to cooperate is becoming a dangerous weak spot for NATO.
The danger isn’t theoretical. NATO’s rolling crisis has changed the incentives for Vladimir Putin, the alliance’s biggest adversary. As the comparatively pro-Russia Trump presidency turns toward its final years and Europe remilitarizes, Mr. Putin may conclude that his chance to permanently damage the alliance is slipping away. In late June, Latvian intelligence and Polish leaders said Russia was preparing military provocations against NATO countries. As one European ambassador in Brussels put it, “Putin’s window to destroy NATO is closing.”
At first, Mr. Rutte’s strategy seemed to be working. European leaders were panicked by Mr. Trump’s second election in 2024. Mr. Rutte, who had been in the job for all of one month, set about putting that fear to use. He called Mr. Trump the day after the vote to offer his congratulations, and they soon arranged talks in Mar-a-Lago.
His meeting with Trump at the Florida resort on Nov. 22 was convivial and light on substance, attendees say; Mr. Rutte got down to brass tacks at dinner with Mr. Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael Waltz, instead. Among the biggest challenges Mr. Rutte faced was Mr. Trump’s first-term demand that NATO countries spend at least 4 percent of their G.D.P.s on their militaries — a number he would soon raise to 5 percent. Few believed Europeans would pony up; some thought Mr. Trump was creating an excuse to blow up the alliance.
To everyone’s surprise, Mr. Rutte got it done, sealing the spending deal at The Hague in late June 2025. In comments at the close of the summit, the president adopted a surprisingly soft tone toward the alliance. “These people really love their countries,” an uncharacteristically empathetic Mr. Trump said. “It’s not a rip-off. And we’re here to help.”
If the events at The Hague seemed a validation of Mr. Rutte’s approach toward Mr. Trump, saving NATO itself has proved a harder challenge.
European members have underspent on their armed forces in the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and their military readiness as a result has tanked. Britain has a small fraction of the warships it had then. Germany went decades ignoring NATO’s spending target of 2 percent of G.D.P. and has fewer than 200,000 active-duty service members, compared with America’s 1.3 million. A few frontline states such as Poland and Finland have militaries capable of going toe-to-toe with Russia, but none can replace American capabilities, including airlifts, air-to-air refueling, battlefield intelligence and the ability to precisely strike targets deep in enemy territory.
Since The Hague, most NATO members are spending more on their militaries, most importantly Germany, which is on track to get to 5 percent of G.D.P. before the agreement’s 2035 deadline. For the United States to safely shift its attention and resources to deter China’s mounting ambitions in Asia, as Mr. Trump and all his recent predecessors have tried to do, the Europeans will need to buy the right equipment and coordinate better.
“If you imagine a potluck dinner where everybody gets to choose what they bring,” said Julie Smith, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, “everybody will bring the paper plates and a bag of chips, while the Americans still end up bringing the steak.”
Efforts to build a joint European fighter jet fell apart in June amid French and German squabbling over who would reap the biggest economic benefits. France has not joined the largest air defense collaboration, among more than 20 European NATO countries, preferring to build its own technology. The need to coordinate is only more urgent as the priorities of warfare are changing.
Mr. Trump continues to give Mr. Rutte plenty of material to work with. Within days of ousting the Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro last January, the president mused anew about taking Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, a founding NATO member. Over the following weeks, the alliance nearly fractured as European countries sent small defensive detachments to the island and Trump officials upped their threats. Mr. Rutte again saved the day, getting Mr. Trump to back down at the January economic forum in Davos, by pushing a NATO-led collaboration known as Arctic Sentry.
“We would not have solved the Greenland crisis,” said the Democratic senator Chris Coons, “if Rutte had not positioned himself to be an offramp.”
Mr. Rutte speaks and texts regularly with the leaders of the NATO member countries, including Mr. Trump. After the United States and Israel attacked Iran in February, Mr. Rutte convened a Signal chat with the leaders of France, Britain, Germany and others to tamp down criticism of the war — which he feared might lead to a tit-for-tat cut in American aid to Ukraine. In an interview that Britain’s Daily Telegraph published in April, Mr. Trump said he was considering pulling out of the alliance. After Mr. Rutte talked him down during that April 8 meeting, by telling him that leaving NATO would undercut his victory at The Hague, Mr. Trump shifted to curtailing American troop deployments in Germany and Poland.
Yet even faced with the prospect of an American drawdown, European leaders still struggle to overcome decades of favoritism for their chosen military contractors and centuries of suspicion that continental cooperation is just a stalking horse for French or German domination.
The Ankara summit could go very wrong. Mr. Trump is hugely unpopular in Europe, giving leaders such as the leftist Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, and the right-wing Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, reasons to pick a fight. Mr. Rutte has planned a deliberately short summit with short meetings and a short joint statement at the end.
He will also maintain his trademark — and often inexplicable — optimism. Asked during an impromptu conversation at NATO headquarters in mid-June how the effort to save NATO was going, Mr. Rutte responded, “I was never worried about NATO. It’s there, so strong, the alliance.” Few in Ankara will agree. As the mistrust and squabbling continue, the problem is no longer just whether America will be a good ally to Europe. It’s whether Europeans can be good allies for themselves.
