Ex-national security official warns: Trump has already 'destroyed' NATO

President Donald Trump has “destroyed” the 77-year-old NATO alliance, “without tearing up the treaty or even firing a shot,” argues former Trump Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor at Defiance.News.

At the heart of NATO sits Article 5: the principle that an attack on one member is an attack on all, and the commitment that every member will come to the attacked nation’s defense.

Taylor, who served in the first Trump administration, points to a survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations that finds majorities in every country polled doubt the United States would come to their aid if they were attacked.

“That’s a stake in the heart of the NATO alliance,” writes Taylor. That core Article 5 promise is “no longer believed by the very people it was written to protect. You can’t deter an adversary with a ‘guarantee’ your allies now think is hollow.”

“Even if Trump doesn’t care about this or is too inept to understand these numbers, Vladimir Putin is paying close attention,” warns Taylor.

“Alliances aren’t built on paper,” he explains. “Like a marriage, that’s just where they get documented. America’s most important alliances are built around shared belief, i.e. a conviction that when the worst comes, your friends will come for you. The genius of the postwar order that American diplomats Dean Acheson and George Marshall built was that it made that belief credible enough to deter the Soviet Union for forty years without a shot fired across the Fulda Gap.”

“Deterrence,” he notes, “lived in the minds of our enemies. And it’s in the mind that Trump has done his damage.”

Taylor also points to another “truly terrible” part of that poll he says found that “just 11 percent of Europeans across fifteen countries now regard the United States as an ally. That’s a record low.”

He calls it a “gut punch” that Trump will be headed to France to attend a G7 meeting in mid-June, and later to Turkey for a NATO summit in early July.

“Trump will go into those meetings as the most diminished American president in the history of the transatlantic alliance,” Taylor observes.

Europeans are now doing “what frightened nations have always done”: arming themselves because they don’t believe friendship with America is something they can rely on.

Taylor notes that European nations used to buy American-made weapons in part because they believed they would at some point be fighting alongside America. Now they are buying weapons from other countries because they fear at some point they may not.

He offers one note of optimism: that poll also found that in every nation polled but one, “majorities of Europeans believe relations will improve the moment Trump leaves office.”

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