In 1944, moved by a desire to serve her country, Gloria Harnett Kerzner joined the Navy Reserve, as men left for combat and the military recruited women to fill roles back home.
Ms. Kerzner, who served as a yeoman at the Naval Air Station in Lakehurst, N.J., still remembers the era’s political rhetoric, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom she admired, giving the need to protect allies as a rationale for going to war.
In the war’s aftermath, Ms. Kerzner recalled her other heroes, Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman, promoting a popular sentiment: to establish an alliance of nations that could prevent future conflicts.
“A united front against war,” she said. “Everybody got in together and told some bully nation: You can’t do this.”
At age 102, Ms. Kerzner is one of about 50,000 World War II veterans still alive who witnessed the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. She and other veterans of the era, attuned from experience to the ways American foreign policy can shift, are paying close attention to President Trump’s repeated threats to leave the alliance. Mr. Trump has said that NATO does little for the United States despite relying on it for funding and security, a stance that has upended the geopolitical norms that the service of World War II veterans helped to establish.
In interviews, most veterans agreed that the United States and Europe were stronger when working together. Some suggested that the partnership could be revamped for modern times.
Ms. Kerzner said that NATO hadn’t followed through on its promises. She said she shared President Trump’s frustrations over the alliance, believing that other members should have heeded his recent request for assistance during the war with Iran.
“They should know where their bread is buttered,” Ms. Kerzner said.
Established after World War II, NATO has come to symbolize the collective strength of its 32 allied nations, underpinned by the alliance’s Article 5, which states that if one nation is attacked, the others will come to its aid. The article has been invoked only once, the day after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Mr. Trump has focused his latest broadside against NATO on member countries that have been reluctant to aid the United States in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, where as much as one-fifth of the world’s oil is transported. Iran seized the strait after the United States and Israel attacked the country at the end of February, bringing shipping routes to a standstill and destabilizing the global oil trade. During his first term, Mr. Trump said that other member nations were not contributing the financial support they had pledged to NATO.
Last week, after a visit with NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, the president continued to express frustration, writing on his platform, Truth Social, that NATO had let the United States down. Still, for the United States to formally leave NATO, Mr. Trump would need an act of Congress or a two-thirds vote in the Senate.
For veterans including Eugene Richardson, the survival of the relationship seemed paramount.
“The president was way off base,” Mr. Richardson said of Mr. Trump’s recent threats. “It was senseless to me.”
Mr. Richardson was part of an elite group of Black pilots known as the Tuskegee Airmen, revered for their near perfect record escorting bomber planes inside enemy airspace.
While he considers NATO a bulwark of Western power, Mr. Richardson said the alliance could be tweaked. “Most things can be improved,” he noted, suggesting that each member should reinforce their pledge.
Joe Pietroforte, another World War II veteran, has a soldier’s mentality about the United States tensions with NATO. Despite weighing just 118 pounds during the war, he carried a rocket launcher onto the battlefields of Europe, earning a Silver Star and the nickname “Bazooka Joe.”
“I have to put our trust in whoever is in charge of our country,” Mr. Pietroforte, now 107, said. He added that President Trump “has done all right.”
NATO helped establish the postwar order, said Robert Citino, a military historian at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, and reflected a shift in American strategy.
After World War I, the United States became more insular, focusing on domestic issues, Mr. Citino said. But World War II prompted a new form of engagement, with the nation entrenching its presence across Europe with bases, airfields and command stations.
“We came out of the worst war in the 20th century — bloodiest, most expensive war of all human history, not just the 20th century — and the lesson we derived was that the United States was better off when it had commitments to allies abroad,” Mr. Citino said.
That is partly why Charles Kavalec, of Fort Collins, Colo., welcomed Europe’s defiance of the president.
Mr. Kavalec, now 107, taught the automated gunning system under B-29 bombers in the Army Air Corps. By the time he was slated for deployment, the war had ended.
“It’s probably good in the fact that they are trying to hold Trump down a little bit,” he said, adding: “We got to stick all together.”
Bernard Mokam covers breaking news.
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