MIAMI BEACH — The United States may stop promising to defend its NATO allies should they come under attack, President Donald Trump said Friday, escalating his verbal barrage against the alliance as his frustration grows that European leaders have not significantly contributed to his war against Iran.
“NATO just wasn’t there” when he asked for help with the Iran war, Trump told a Miami Beach investment conference sponsored by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. That, he said, was “a tremendous mistake” by the Europeans.
“We spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on NATO, hundreds, protecting them, and we would have always been there for them, but now, based on their actions, I guess we don’t have to be,” he continued.
That’s “breaking news,” he added for emphasis. “Why would we be there for them? If they’re not there for us.”
Trump in his first term edged close to saying he would pull the U.S. out of NATO, telling leaders in 2018 that he would “do his own thing” if they didn’t bolster spending. But he backed down under pressure from Republican leaders in Congress and leading members of his administration. Whether he would follow through with his implied threat this time is unclear. Trump embraces his reputation for unpredictability.
Asked Friday whether Trump’s warnings about NATO amounted to a formal policy shift, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that “President Trump has been very vocal and honest about his displeasure with NATO.”
Trump has long been critical of European allies, who he says have taken advantage of the United States by relying on the U.S. military to defend them. But until recently, he had been gentler toward them after winning pledges last year for European countries and Canada to significantly increase their defense spending to 5 percent of their annual economic output.
In recent months, however, he has grown publicly more bellicose toward them, first over his desire to seize Greenland, a Danish territory, and then over the war.
As a result, the U.S. commitment to NATO appears to be under renewed question ahead of a July summit of alliance leaders in the Turkish capital of Ankara.
Trump has repeatedly said that when he asked European leaders for contributions to the war effort, he was “more doing a test.”
“I said: ‘I really would love to have you come up, bring your boats. You can sail through the beautiful Hormuz straits and you can protect people that are being shot at.’ They didn’t do it. And that’s small potatoes,” he said Thursday at a Cabinet meeting.
“They didn’t want to get involved, and I believe that’s going to cost them dearly,” he said.
Iran’s attacks on ships and threats against oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz have all but shut down the channel in recent weeks, sending global energy prices skyrocketing.
From the outset of the war, European leaders have been leery about the legality and wisdom of attacking the Iranian regime, and many of them continue to say that the only long-term way to contain Tehran’s nuclear ambitions is through diplomacy.
European officials also face voters who are furious with Trump for suggesting in January that he would seize Greenland— diminishing their appetite for joining in a war of choice the following month.
Trump has been especially furious with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who before the war started on Feb. 28 denied access for U.S. fighter jets to use key British air bases for the attack on Iran. Once the war started, Starmer reversed course, saying that British law allowed the bases to be used for what he said was an action to defend allied citizens who were under attack in the region.
Trump said Starmer offered to contribute two British aircraft carriers to the fight but that it was “too late” by the time the offer was made, a week into the war.
European leaders now say they are discussing how they might contribute to an effort to protect the Strait of Hormuz, but Trump has suggested they are dragging their feet.
The administration has already been engaged in an effort to shift more of NATO’s Europe-based military planning and command structures to European control. And in recent days, the Pentagon has discussed diverting military aid that it provides to Ukraine to the Middle East.
But a more formal policy shift — either to pull back the tens of thousands of U.S. troops that are stationed on European soil, or to declare that the United States would no longer adhere to NATO’s treaty doctrine that an attack on one member would be treated as an attack on all 32 member nations — would be far more of an earthquake.
The alliance holds annual summits of its leaders, moments in which they set priorities and discuss strategy. Trump has often used the gatherings to threaten allies and push them to spend more.
July’s will likely be contentious. French President Emmanuel Macron has declared that France will not take part in combat around Iran while the war is in its active phases, saying that his country is not a party to the conflict. He has pledged to send help to secure the Strait of Hormuz afterward.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has been seeking to stay on Trump’s good side in recent weeks despite the blowback from other leaders, praising the war in Iran to such an extent that he has started to draw criticism from other NATO leaders who say he is not speaking for them.
“Iran is an exporter of chaos to the region and to the world for many years now. Let’s not be naive about that, and what the United States is doing now is degrading that capability. And yes, I applaud that,” Rutte told reporters Thursday in Brussels.
Rutte said that European countries, having not been warned ahead of time about the attack on Iran, needed time to gather their forces to join the effort.
“Europe needed time because the United States, for good reasons, was not able to inform allies of what was going to happen now, three and a half weeks ago, on Saturday morning, because that would have, yeah, that would have potentially led to a leak,” he said. “I totally understand that. I don’t criticize that, but it means that it takes some time for Europe to come together, and that’s happening as we speak.”
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