Published April 24, 2025
The annual NATO summit in Brussels on June 24 and 25 is likely to be the most consequential in decades. With President Trump effectively threatening to withdraw America’s active participation in the alliance, it’s not too far from the truth to say that transtlanticists have two months to save NATO.
President Donald Trump’s words and deeds have convinced many Europeans that it is only a matter of time until he either withdraws the United States from NATO or renders its treaty obligations meaningless. That’s only partly correct: what Trump is really after is an historic reordering of relative responsibilities for the collective defence.
After years of getting little more than words however from most European allies, Trump has lost patience. He will surely arrive in Brussels with an attitude of “I told you so,” noting that he proved to be correct regarding Europe’s energy exposure to Russia and the eventual failure of the continent’s idea that enmeshing Putin in an economic embrace would remove his aggressive impulses.
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Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, studies and provides commentary on American politics. His work focuses on how America’s political order is being upended by populist challenges, from the left and the right. He also studies populism’s impact in other democracies in the developed world.
