NATO allies prepare for possible Trump victory in 2024

London — Six months from presidential electionAmerica’s NATO allies are considering increasing their defense spending in anticipation of the potential disruption of a second Donald Trump presidency.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is preparing a financing plan to try to protect the 75-year-old military partnership from any changing political realities that could affect the alliance, according to Oana Lungescu, who was until Stoltenberg’s main NATO spokesperson last year. .

“It is important to have predictability both for allies and for Ukraine“, Lungescu told CBS News. “This (plan) relieves the United States of some of its organizational burden while maintaining full oversight,” she said.

Stoltenberg has proposed a five-year, $107 billion military aid package for Ukraine that would give the broader alliance a more direct role in funding, Reuters reported last month.

Under the plan, European allies would create a shared aid fund for Ukraine and increase their contributions to kyiv’s war effort, reducing significant funding provided by the United States.

Trump’s first term as president demonstrated that the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee is not afraid to shake up the NATO alliance. Trump shocked America’s allies with his open criticism of the failure of some NATO members to meet their defense funding commitments, and the Trump campaign has said that calling on allies to increase defense spending is a policy that the future Trump White House would pursue aggressively.

In an emailed statement, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that “President Trump caused our allies to increase their spending in NATO by demanding that they pay, but crooked Joe Biden came back and let them take advantage of the American taxpayer.”

“When President Trump returns to the Oval Office, he will restore peace and rebuild American strength and deterrence on the world stage,” Leavitt said.

Lungescu said Stoltenberg’s proposed strategy would address Trump’s complaint that NATO allies are not doing enough to share the economic burden. At the same time, Stoltenberg is trying to protect Ukraine from a serious crisis delays in Congress – primarily driven by Republicans in the House of Representatives – which cut off US aid and arms funding for the first half of the year. NATO allies are also increasing their own defense spending, Lungescu told CBS News, while pointing out that U.S. presidents since Eisenhower have criticized NATO partners for not contributing enough.

NATO guidelines state that member states should devote at least 2% of their gross domestic product (GDP) to defense spending to continue to ensure the military readiness of the Alliance.

By NATO’s own admission, in terms of GDP, the wealth of its members “is almost equal to that of the United States.” But “non-US allies together spend less than half of what the United States spends on defense,” according to the NATO website.

By 2023, only 10 of NATO’s remaining 30 allies had met the 2% spending commitment, excluding the United States, although two-thirds of NATO allies are expected to meet the 2% spending target. by the end of the year.

“I think that when we get to the NATO summit in Washington in July, we will have updated figures and will be in an even better position in terms of significantly increasing defense spending,” Lungescu predicted.

Trump vows not to protect NATO allies who don’t increase spending

In February, former President Trump told a campaign rally in South Carolina that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever it wants” to NATO allies that are not paying their fair share in the Western military alliance.

Referring to a conversation with an unnamed leader of a NATO country who asked him, “If we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us,” Trump responded, “Absolutely not.”

Since Trump left office in January 2021, his former national security adviser, John Bolton, has said that the former president was close to withdrawing the United States from NATO at the end of a summit in 2018 and said another Trump term presented an existential threat to trans people. -Atlantic Alliance.

“Many (NATO) countries owe us an awful lot of money…The United States paid and stepped up like no other,” Trump said at a NATO meeting in July 2018, adding that “something must be done”.

Will Trump withdraw the United States from NATO?

“I think Trump will do significant damage in a second term, damage that in some cases will be irreparable,” Bolton wrote in his 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.” He said he believed Trump intended to remove America from the alliance if he was re-elected.

“I think he has every intention of doing this,” Bolton wrote. “I think it would be a catastrophic decision for America and for a whole host of other things. It’s a very bleak prospect to see Trump in a second term.”

“I think actually the biggest danger he (Trump) poses to NATO is his unpredictability,” Ben Hodges, former commanding general of the U.S. Army Europe, told CBS News. “The urgency to invest in defense is even greater if Trump proves not to be as reliable as all other U.S. presidents have been.”

Hodges said one way to ensure NATO allies maintain smooth diplomatic relations with any incoming Trump administration would be for U.S. allies to honor their commitments and increase defense spending now.

But he is skeptical of Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from NATO, pointing to a law passed by Congress last year that prohibits the president from withdrawing from NATO or using funds appropriated for this purpose without the approval of legislators.

War game simulates NATO collapse in second Trump term

A recent war game led by Finley Grimble, a former intelligence analyst at the British Ministry of Defense, revealed that in the event of a second Trump presidency, the alliance would be vulnerable to collapse, even if the United States United States was not withdrawing from NATO.

Grimble’s war game was based on a scenario in which Trump wins the election. The new administration immediately attempts to unilaterally negotiate a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia. Negotiations fail and Trump then cuts foreign aid to Ukraine.

Lacking the congressional majority needed to formally withdraw the United States from the NATO treaty, the Trump White House then significantly reduced U.S. participation in NATO exercises, including moving 50% of the presence American military in Europe towards the Indo-Pacific region.

Grimble told CBS News that his analysis showed that such a scenario would leave NATO as a “hollow and unprepared shell” by continuing a policy of NATO “dormancy.”

In Grimble’s war game, Trump takes advantage of the NATO command structure in which the supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe is always a US officer and is responsible for overall command of NATO military operations. NATO.

“NATO has war plans that are ready to go… but the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe would answer to Donald Trump,” Grimble told CBS News.

“You tell (NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander) to stop cooperating, stop implementing plans, and everything falls apart. And that’s what Trump did in the game,” did he declare.