Ivo Daalder on the Europeans’ current dilemma with NATO and Trump

Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay wrote one of the most influential contemporary critiques of the Cheney-Bush foreign policy, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (2003).¹ In an article by the same title, they wrote:

What precisely was the Bush revolution in foreign policy? At its broadest level, it rested on two beliefs. The first was that in a dangerous world the best—if not the only—way to ensure America’s security was to shed the constraints imposed by friends, allies, and international institutions. Maximizing America’s freedom to act was essential because the unique position of the United States made it the most likely target for any country or group hostile to the West. Americans could not count on others to protect them; countries inevitably ignored threats that did not involve them. Moreover, formal arrangements would inevitably constrain the ability of the United States to make the most of its unrivaled power. Gulliver must shed the constraints that he helped the Lilliputians weave.

The second belief was that an America unbound should use its strength to change the status quo in the world. Bush did not argue that the United States keep its powder dry while it waited for dangers to gather. Whereas John Quincy Adams—the only other son of a president later to occupy the White House—had held that the United States should not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy,” Bush argued that America would be imperiled if it failed to do just that. “Time is not on our side,” he warned in the “Axis of Evil” speech, his 2002 State of the Union address. “I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” That logic guided the Iraq War, and it animated Bush’s efforts to deal with other rogue states.² [my emphasis]

The foreign policy perspective that motivated grim characters like Dick Cheney and adopted by George W. Bush was and is known as neoconservatism, which basically endorsed the US throwing its weight around without being constrained by allies or law (especially not international law) and certainly not by anything so weak and wimpy as morality. In an important sense, neoconservatism was a close cousin to the Old Right nationalism of the post-Second World War period, in that both were based on militant nationalism.³ As Daalder and Lindsay put it in 2003:

Although neoconservatives and assertive nationalists differed on whether the United States should actively spread its values abroad, both were deeply skeptical of the cold war consensus on the importance of the rule of law and the relevance of international institutions to American foreign policy. They placed their faith not in diplomacy and treaties, but in power and resolve.

A less toxic version can be found today in some conservative “restrainers,” though others with the restrainer perspective have more a liberal-internationalist or left-antiwar perspective. Foreign policy realists like Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer often wind up with the same policy perspectives as restrainers because both groups tend to actually follow the maxim that was rumored to be Obama’s DDSS perspective on foreign policy of “don’t do stupid stuff,” aka, don’t do stupid s***.

The Trumpista faithful like to think of Trump as a Peace President avoiding the foreign entanglements the isolationists complain about while still being willing to blow up perceived Bad Guys occasionally. But the Trump version of unilateralism is essentially the same as the Cheney-Bush form of interventionism, based as they both are on narrow, proudly amoral nationalism. The difference is that characters like Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice actually also knew a lot about international diplomacy and had some notion of how to use American alliances as force multipliers for their policies. (Much to the detriment of very many Iraqis and Afghans.)

In a contemporary analysis, Daalder looks at the current state of Trump’s own strange version of aggressive nationalism and its implications for Europe.⁴ His article is phrased in conventional foreign policy advice style, which is nominally directed to policymakers and explaining the need for options the writer takes to be credible and/or desirable. With the Trump Republicans, this style seems awkward and misdirected. But Trump hasn’t yet formally pulled the US out of NATO, so that context still needs to be included in such pieces. As Daalder discusses later in the essay, NATO provides not only a US security commitment to Europe but also a very substantial level of control over what the NATO allies can do militarily without the US.

Mutual defense obligations and their ambiguities

In this piece, he looks at what he calls the “key question Europeans still need to answer[:] how to ensure Ukraine’s security without U.S. backing and how to take primary responsibility for their own defense.” He recommends the idea that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has floated of reaching an agreement with Russia that would include forces from NATO countries as peacekeepers inside Ukraine. He lists four conditions that would be needed for this. They include: a major European role in the peace negotiations – which the Trump Administration rejects; no limitations on the agreement on Western supplies to Ukrainian forces - which would be exceptionally tricky for Russia to accept; and the US remaining “fully committed” to NATO’s Article 5 mutual-defense provision. Trump and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have all but openly rejected the latter. And, as Mearsheimer recently pointed out:

Article 5 never said that the United States would axiomatically use military force to come to the rescue of a fellow NATO country. But almost everyone believes that to be the case. It was essential to say just that during the Cold War. West Germany was the frontline state, and it had no nuclear weapons. The Germans were deeply concerned that the U.S. would not use its nuclear weapons to defend them if they were in dire straits. So, the U.S. emphasized Article 5 in a way that made it sound like we would automatically use nuclear weapons in such a case. In fact, both former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said after they were out of office that they would not have used nuclear weapons to defend Germany.

They did not say that while they were in office.⁵ [my emphasis]

He’s right: the actual language of the NATO Treaty isn’t nearly as unconditional as most people probably imagine it to be.⁶ On the face of it, the mutual defense clause and the solidarity clause in the European Union Treaty are more binding that that of NATO in terms of providing military defense.⁷

Of course, that kind of commitment is only credible if both allies and particularly adversaries believe the commitment will be honored by the allies. It’s hard to see at the moment how either NATO allies or Russia will take that to be an automatic result of a direct attack on a NATO country like Poland, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, or Lithuania. And even an Administration far more capable of strategic diplomacy than Trump’s would have a tough time getting the Russians to agree to allow peacekeepers from NATO countries to be deployed in Ukraine.

Another condition Daalder considers essential also reads like a statement of the real and immediate problems European allies will have distancing their own military decisions from that of the US:

Finally, the United States needs to remain fully committed to Article 5 and commit to defend Europe in case of an armed attack against a NATO member. Europeans cannot be expected to weaken their defense and deterrence capacity by deploying their most advanced capabilities to prevent the recurrence of war in Ukraine without the sure knowledge, reaffirmed at the highest level, that the United States remains fully committed to NATO’s collective security and defense. [my emphasis]

Trump’s sudden and drastic realignment of the US to Russia and against the European still-nominally-allies puts immediate and urgent pressure on European countries – especially Britain, France, Germany, and Poland – to boost not only their military spending but to reduce the control the US can exercise over their militaries.

But then he goes on to describe the kind of commitments that he sees Europe needing to take for their own defense, still going on the assumption that the current Atlantic partnership will continue in some form. And he closes it with the polite and hopeful comment:

It’s time for a new trans-Atlantic bargain - one where Europe takes primary responsibility for security on the continent and where the United States empowers and enables Europe to do so. The White House may be in no mood to accept this timeline for transitioning responsibility, but agreeing to it will strengthen Europe’s commitment to its own security and a renewed trans-Atlantic relationship.

1. Internet Archive. <https://archive.org/details/americaunboundbu0000daal>

2. Daalder, Ivo & Lindsay, James (2003): America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy. Brookings 09/01/2003. <https://www.brookings.edu/articles/america-unbound-the-bush-revolution-in-foreign-policy/> (Accessed: 2025-09-03).

3. Ronald Radosh, a former leftie who in the 1970s was adopting to more conservative intellectual fashions, wrote about the supposedly antiwar Old Right isolationists in Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism (1978). <https://archive.org/details/prophetsonrightp0000rona>. Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman also provided a look at this notably sordid political trend in the mid-1940s in Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949). <chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://files.libcom.org/files/Leo%20Lo_wenthal%20and%20Norbert%20Guterman%20-%20Prophets%20of%20Deceit%20-%20A%20Study%20of%20the%20Techniques%20of%20the%20American%20Agitator%20(1949).pdf>

4. Daalder, Ivo (2025): Foreign Policy 03/07/2025. <https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/03/07/ukraine-russia-nato-europe-security-defense/?utm_content=gifting&tpcc=gifting_article&gifting_article=dWtyYWluZS1ydXNzaWEtbmF0by1ldXJvcGUtc2VjdXJpdHktZGVmZW5zZQ==&pid=CW3657086> (Accessed: 2025-09-03).

5. Mearsheimer, John (2025) (Interview): The Shifting World Order. "Trump and Vance Have Contempt for The Europeans": Spiegel International 08.03.25. <https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-shifting-world-order-trump-and-vancehavecontempt-for-the-europeans-a-7e70c5b5-b307-45cc-940e-62e40a506ad2> (Accessed: 2025-08-03).

6. Collective defence and Article 5. NATO website 07/04/2025. <https://www.nato.int/cps/fr/natohq/topics_110496.htm?selectedLocale=en> (Accessed: 2025-09-03).

7. Mutual defense clause. EUR-Lex, n/d. <https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/glossary/mutual-defence-clause.html> (Accessed: 2025-09-03).