Trump has plans to "attack" NATO. America is now a bigger threat to the alliance than Russia.
Despite reports that Moscow is preparing for direct conflict with NATO countries, the near-term danger comes from Washington. The Pentagon is plotting revenge against Europe.
This week, the United States officially became a nearer-term threat to NATO than any of its actual enemies. That’s because Donald Trump is planning to attack the alliance for being disloyal to him.
The headlines this morning about America’s most important alliance were almost darkly comedic.
European intelligence services warned that Russia could be prepared to strike NATO countries within a year, and the Polish prime minister sounded the alarm that it could happen even sooner — within months. You would think that might be the gravest threat to the alliance that has protected the Western world for more than 75 years. Alas, you’d be wrong.
Today, Reuters reported that the Trump administration has its own plan to attack NATO — from within. An internal Pentagon email is allegedly circulating options to strike back against NATO allies for refusing to join Trump’s war in Iran, including a proposal to suspend key countries from the alliance altogether. Although these plans don’t seem to include physical attacks against NATO, Trump’s threats to violently seize territory in Greenland are still fresh in the alliance’s memory.
Specifically, Trump’s Pentagon is considering ways to retaliate against those countries that refused to provide basing, access, and overflight rights for American strikes in Iran. The options reportedly include suspending countries like Spain from NATO itself and removing other nations from important positions within the alliance. Additionally, the memo proposes other retaliatory measures for individual countries, such as reconsidering longstanding U.S. diplomatic support for British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands.
The email frames all of this as a corrective against what it calls a “sense of entitlement on the part of the Europeans.” The Pentagon press secretary confirmed the spirit of the document without denying it, declaring that “they were not there for us.”
This is a remarkably ignorant statement. NATO’s founding logic is collective defense — the bedrock guarantee that an attack on one is an attack on all. What the Trump administration is now proposing, in effect, is a conditional inversion of that principle: we will support you… but only if you supported us first… in a war of our choosing… on the terms we set… and on which you had no say. In my view, that’s a bit closer to the logic of a protection racket than an actual alliance.
What makes this doubly dangerous is the moment in which it’s happening.
European intelligence services have reportedly concluded that Russia is rebounding from its Ukraine war and eying possible attacks against NATO. Although Russia suffered an estimated 1.2 million permanent casualties, it has managed not only to replace those forces but to improve them. Moscow believes it’s stronger from the combat experience, drone warfare expertise, and development of new hypersonic missile systems. In light of this, European spy agencies warn there is a real risk of Russian aggression, including unintended and hard-to-control escalation.
Here’s the scarier thing. Those agencies assess that Russia wouldn’t need to defeat NATO militarily to succeed. The objective of a limited conflict, the report states, would be to pull the alliance apart politically by fracturing it and demoralizing it — with the goal of demonstrating that “collective defense” is a fiction. In other words, a NATO that cannot agree on who the enemy is, or whether to show up when called upon, is a NATO that has already half-defeated itself.
Donald Trump is making the implosion of NATO a self-fulfilling prophecy. He’s already shown that Washington is worse than a fickle anchor of the alliance. It’s a vindictive one, doing deep damage to the compact from the inside. In fact, the report from European intelligence explicitly notes that the unpredictable course of current U.S. policy may be influencing Moscow’s cost-benefit calculations for an attack. That’s diplomatic speak for how Trump is doing Putin’s work for him.
None of this is entirely new. Trump has described NATO as a burden since his first term. When I was in the administration, we were on pins and needles, worried that on any given day the president wouldn’t announce America was “out” of the alliance. Top officials regularly intervened to dissuade Trump from doing something America would regret for decades. Of course, no one around him would do that these days.
The president told news outlets just weeks ago that withdrawing from the alliance was something he was actively considering. And now he’s plotting to expand his revenge presidency across the Atlantic. Trump has spent the past year going after political opponents and institutions here at home in the name of “retribution.” Now he wants to intentionally harm our longest-standing allies for being insufficiently loyal to him personally.
European spy agencies are warning that Russia is rebuilding its military to directly challenge NATO, seeing the West as fractured. And they’re right to make that assessment. The Pentagon email suggests that the fracturing is well underway — not from Moscow, but from Washington. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has already been speaking like a foreign enemy of NATO, rather than a friend — mocking the alliance as a “paper tiger.”
But this is not a eulogy. Congress still holds tools that Trump cannot “executive-order” away, including the ability to codify American commitments to NATO allies in statute, to condition defense spending on alliance obligations, and to make clear in law that the United States government is larger than one vindictive president. Republicans in Congress have so far refused to do any of that. Which is one more reason Democrats need to win in November.
Your friend, in defiance,
P.S. Miss the most recent DEFIANCE Daily? Last night, former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi joined us to break down DOJ’s major “revenge indictment” this week against a civil rights group.
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The days US superpower are in real time decline. We are witness to the change in World order which will leave the US behind,
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