The Trump administration is breaking the Western alliance and calling it burden-sharing.
I want to tell you what that costs. Not in NATO budgets or geopolitical analysis — in the life of the family down the road from my shop. A mother working two jobs in Hapeville. A kid who needs a strep test his mother cannot afford to takea half-day for. A young man I know who welded at a Lockheed plant in Marietta for nine years and got laid off last spring when the contract moved. The alliance story is a worker story. The people who do not tell you that are the people who make their money off you not knowing it.
The fact of the breaking is on the public record. In January, leaders of the European Union’s most powerful member states held a five-hour emergency session past midnight at the European Council headquarters in Brussels — the Belgians call the building the Space Egg. No cameras, no recordings, no phones. The topic was what to do about the United States under Donald Trump. Emmanuel Macron told the room there was no going back. Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, was not in the room but was on a British phone number he had kept from his London days, texting European leaders the same message: the old America is not coming back, and Europe needed to stop pretending otherwise. By the time the same group met again in March, after Trump had ordered airstrikes on Iran and fuel prices spiked across the continent, the German chancellor Friedrich Merz was openly furious, saying Russia would be the only winner of the Middle East’s newest war. Even Giorgia Meloni, who had argued through the year that Trump could be reasoned with, conceded to the room that the man was not reasonable. By the time the NATO summit in The Hague ended in June, the rupture had been transacted. The alliance had agreed to a 5%-of-GDP defense spending target by 2035 that almost no European government plans to meet, and the White House was calling it victory.
I know what that headline number means in real money because I have watched real money move through the shop I run in Redemption Springs, Georgia. Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing — the big five, the primes — do not advertise on local radio in places like mine. They advertise on C-SPAN and in Foreign Affairs and at the Reagan Library. Their lobbyists do not knock on my door. Their lobbyists knock on the doors of the members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, and of the appropriators who write the checks. The defense budget is not a strategic document. The defense budget is an invoice the primes submit to Congress with the help of the think tanks they fund, and Congress has been writing that check for forty years without anyone counting what is in it. My background includes the years in the Fox habit when I voted for a lot of those congressmen without watching where the money went. The people in my customer waiting area and I are not voting for them again once we understand what the bill actually is.
The thing the alliance was supposed to be was a guarantee that European countries would defend themselves and that the United States would back them up if a serious war came. The Soviet Union was the serious war. The Soviet Union is gone. What replaced the original purpose was a procurement arrangement: treaties and bases and intelligence partnerships that, by 2014 when the Wales Summit set the 2% target, had turned into a way for American defense contractors to sell their hardware into European militaries that were not building their own. The 2% target was a number almost no European member met, and the shortfall was treated as a problem of European will. The shortfall was actually a feature of the arrangement. Europe was supposed to be a customer. Europe was not supposed to be a competitor. The arrangement worked for the primes and the generals and the members of Congress whose districts hosted the plants. The arrangement did not work for the security of the European continent, and it did not work for the working people in my part of Georgia who watched a Lockheed plant in Marietta employ roughly 7,000 people in 2010 and half that by 2024.
My background is the Abrams crews that crossed into Iraq in 2003, and from the gunner’s seat, the gap was plain, because the host-nation logistics at Ramstein and the Kuwaiti staging bases were carried almost entirely by American units, as the European allies who had the political will to ride alongside us did not have the deployable transport, the fuel tankers, the medevac helicopters, or the engineering battalions to sustain a brigade on the move. The European militaries that voted with us at every NATO summit were militaries in name. The American formations that crossed the berm into Iraq carried the alliance’s share of the burden alongside their own share, and the gap was papered over with rhetoric about shared values and the free world. The 2% target the alliance adopted in 2014 was a number almost no European member met. We are now being told 5% is the new floor.
The 5% number was extracted at The Hague with the new American ambassador, Matthew Whitaker, arriving in Brussels to make the demand, and the NATO secretary-general, Mark Rutte, telling holdouts that the headline number was the win the president needed. The “win” was, in the actual text of the agreement, a non-binding political commitment to a number that no European government currently plans to meet, with enforcement deferred for ten years. Britain’s MI6, in an internal assessment, judged the flattery strategy subject to the law of diminishing returns. Spain was the sole holdout. After fifty-four hours of negotiations, Rutte agreed in a letter that Spain could follow “its own sovereign path” and be assessed in 2029. Bulgaria’s then-prime minister, Rosen Zhelyazkov, said the forced atmosphere at the summit masked deep anxiety: European leaders still clung to the belief that they could manage Donald Trump through diplomatic flattery and personal charm. The flattery bought the headline. The flattery did not buy the alliance.
The decoupling that is happening in plain sight is the management of the rupture the January meeting was convened to discuss. European governments are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build European space firms, AI companies, and data centers. They are adopting European open-source software. They are telling civil servants to stop using Microsoft Teams and Office. They are running studies on whether their F-35s, Patriots, and HIMARS rocket launchers will operate without Washington’s permission. None of these moves were announced as anti-American moves. They were announced as efficiency, cost, sovereignty, and procurement-reform moves. The substance is the substance. The alliance’s principal members are systematically reducing their dependence on American hardware, and the American president is treating the reduction as a victory because it produced a press release in which Europeans clapped for him in a closed room.
I think about Eisenhower’s farewell address of January 17, 1961, often, because a man who had run the Allied war in Europe and then served eight years as a Republican president knew what the inside of the arrangement looked like. He warned in plain words about the conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry, and about the total influence that combination had come to exert in every office of the federal government. He did not call it a conspiracy. He called it a tendency, a gravitational pull, the kind of thing that happens when the people who build the weapons and the people who buy the weapons and the people who vote to keep buying the weapons all live in the same three zip codes and rotate through the same six jobs. Sixty-five years later, the tendency Eisenhower named has expanded to include the alliance structure itself. The procurement pipelines run through NATO. The intelligence partnerships run through NATO. The forward-deployed posture the contractors need to justify their next contract runs through NATO. When the contractors need the alliance to produce a certain number for a press release, the contractors call it burden-sharing. When the alliance begins to dismantle the dependence, the contractors call it hostility. The vocabulary is the contractors’ vocabulary, and it has been for a long time.
The intelligence officer from Southern Europe who briefed the European Council in January got the picture right. The European governments are not dealing with an administration that has processes. They are not dealing with a team that has read the history and decided what NATO is for. They are dealing with a single volatile individual who has been told by the contractors and the lobbyists and the politicians in the contractors’ pocket that the alliance is a revenue stream, and who is treating the alliance accordingly. A separate British intelligence assessment compared the White House atmosphere to The Crucible meeting Wolf Hall. Carney is right. The old America is not coming back.
What replaces the arrangement is the question the next decade is going to answer, and the answer will be made by the citizens who decide the contractors are not entitled to keep doing this. A republic that actually wanted the security the soldiers were told the alliance existed to keep would stop handing the contractors a blank check and would start asking what the contractors actually produce for the money. The 5% number in The Hague works out, in real money, to roughly a trillion and a half dollars of new European defense spending over the next decade, and a large share of that money is going to flow to American primes unless someone watches where it goes. The soldiers who came home from Iraq with no job, no GI Bill benefit properly processed, and a back that gives out every winter are not beneficiaries of the alliance. The mother in Hapeville who works two jobs and cannot afford the strep test is not a beneficiary of the alliance. The young man in Marietta who lost his welding job when the Lockheed contract moved is not a beneficiary of the alliance. They are the alliance’s host. They are the people whose taxes paid for it, whose sons and daughters served in it, and whose towns lost the factories when the contracts moved. A government that was honest with them would treat the 5% headline the way a customer in my shop treats a mechanic’s estimate that does not pencil out: walk it back to the counter, ask what the work actually costs, and decide whether the work is worth doing. The soldiers who served in the alliance were owed that conversation. They are owed it now.