With the political convention season now behind us, America enters the homestretch of an unusual and at times unprecedented presidential campaign. Among the many unusual aspects of the 2024 election is the attention given to NATO, an alliance that’s been a fixture of American foreign policy for 75 years but has seldom been mentioned during the convention season.
Ironies and Worries
There have been 38 Democratic and Republican national conventions since NATO’s founding in 1949. But on only nine occasions has the presidential nominee mentioned the transatlantic alliance in his or her acceptance speech—and four of those have occurred since 2016.
This is partly a function of candidates wanting to speak to a broad swath of America and avoid the in-the-weeds wonkiness that comes with talk of international-security organizations. But it’s also a function of the long-held bipartisan consensus in support of NATO.
A year before NATO’s founding, for example, 65 percent of Americans supported the creation of a mutual-defense alliance binding the U.S. and Western Europe. The U.S. Senate ratified the North Atlantic Treaty with an overwhelming 82-13 vote. American popular support for NATO remained strong throughout the Cold War, during the post-Cold War period and into the post-post-Cold War period ushered in by 9/11.
But support among Americans for NATO is sagging today. Overall, 58 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the alliance. But four in 10 Americans are against, or unsure about, coming to the aid of a NATO ally under attack—an ironclad requirement of the North Atlantic Treaty—and 55 percent of self-identified Republicans and 59 percent of self-identified conservatives have an unfavorable view of the alliance.
This is ironic and worrisome.
It’s ironic because, from Dwight Eisenhower and Barry Goldwater, to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, to Mitt Romney and John McCain, Republican presidential nominees—and their conservative base—have historically been hard-nosed and clear-eyed about deterring Moscow. NATO is a proven instrument for that mission.
It’s worrisome because of what Vladimir Putin’s Russia has done and will continue to do unless met with serious deterrence. Putin’s Russia, it pays to recall, has used military force to attack, stalk and challenge U.S. vessels, U.S. satellites, U.S. territorial waters and U.S. airspace; propped up hostile regimes in this hemisphere; moved nuclear weapons into Belarus; threatened preemptive use of nuclear weapons; occupied parts of Georgia and Ukraine; sieged the whole of Ukraine in a brutal war of unprovoked aggression; violated nuclear treaties and conventional-weapons treaties; simulated nuclear strikes targeting Poland; waged cyberwar against Estonia; hacked and attacked the U.S. power grid; threatened military and/or hybrid attacks against the U.S., Germany, Finland, Sweden and Britain; been implicated in a spate of fires, sabotage operations and attempted assassinations across NATO territory, including U.S. facilities; massively increased military spending; and vowed to rebuild the Russian Empire.
In light of all that—almost two decades of aggression targeting America and its closest allies—we’d expect support for NATO’s time-tested, all-for-one, peace-through-strength strategy to be growing rather than waning within the party of Eisenhower and Reagan. As General James Mattis has observed, “If we did not have NATO, we would need to create it.”
Yet former President Donald Trump seems intent on unraveling the NATO alliance—at a moment when it’s more needed than at any time since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Trump’s broadsides against NATO began in 2016: a declaration that he would come to the defense of NATO members under attack only if they had “fulfilled their obligations to us”; claims that NATO is “obsolete”; his deletion of a sentence from a speech, as president, reaffirming America’s commitment to NATO; reports from his White House staff that “several times” he “privately said he wanted to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”
In February, Trump boasted that when his NATO counterparts asked, “If we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, would you protect us?” he answered, “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.” In August, he declared that “every NATO nation must spend at least 3 percent” of GDP on defense (NATO’s agreed-upon standard is 2 percent).
Convention Mentions
That brings us back to those four convention mentions of NATO in the last quarter-century. They came during the 2024 and 2016 Democratic National Convention and the 2020 and 2016 Republican National Convention. All of these are related to Trump’s relentless criticism of NATO.
During the 2020 convention, Trump scolded NATO allies for being “very far behind in their defense payments.” In 2016, he restated his assessment that NATO is “obsolete” and noted that “many of the member countries” are “not paying their fair share.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton countered in 2016, “I’m proud to stand by our allies in NATO against any threat they face.”
This year, Vice President Kamala Harris aptly highlighted how Trump “threatened to abandon NATO. He encouraged Putin to invade our allies…As president, I will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies.”
Had she wanted to get into the weeds where wonks dwell, she could have added that NATO allies have stood strong with the United States—helping the U.S. defend South Korea at the beginning of the Cold War and liberate Kuwait at the end, helping the U.S. end a war and keep the peace in the Balkans, helping the U.S. avenge 9/11 and prevent a second 9/11, helping the U.S. fight terrorists and tyrants in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.
She could have mentioned that British, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Canadian assets are at work in the Indo-Pacific deterring our common foe and serving as force multipliers for America’s military; that French and British aircraft joined U.S. forces shielding Israel from Iran’s missile-drone salvo in April; that warships from eight NATO navies lead the operation protecting international shipping from Houthi attacks; that more than 70 percent of the alliance has hit the 2-percent-of-GDP standard; that Poland will spend 5 percent of GDP on defense next year; that Sweden has doubled defense spending since 2020; that Germany has almost doubled defense spending since 2022; that France is increasing defense spending by 40 percent between now and 2030; that European defense spending increased by 11 percent last year.
She could have pointed out that our European allies have sent more aid to Ukraine than Americans have; that Germany has delivered tanks, missile defenses, artillery shells and howitzers; that Britain has shipped Ukraine anti-tank systems, anti-air systems, precision-guided missiles, air defenses, tanks and artillery; that Denmark and the Netherlands have sent F-16s to Ukraine; that France has delivered tanks and missiles to Ukraine; that Turkey has sent Ukraine attack drones; that Poland has taken in nearly 2 million refugees.
Harris could have reminded Americans what two of NATO’s founding fathers—a Democrat and a Republican—said when the alliance was brand new.
Taking the reins as NATO’s first military commander, then-General Dwight Eisenhower called NATO “the last remaining chance for the survival of Western civilization.”
“For the first time in history,” President Harry Truman explained, “there exists in peace an integrated international force whose object is to maintain peace through strength.” He added, poignantly, “We devoutly pray that our present course of action will succeed and maintain peace without war.”
Now, as in Truman’s day, prayers and preparedness are needed to prevent great-power war.
Remember
Although it might mean more coming from a Republican, Harris could have noted that politicians who claim President Ronald Reagan’s mantle should remember that he was an unwavering NATO supporter. He never called NATO obsolete, never browbeat NATO laggards, never threatened to withdraw from NATO, never moved the goalposts on NATO allies, never raised doubts about America’s commitment to NATO, and always understood NATO’s importance to America.
Instead of viewing the alliance as a liability, Reagan saw NATO as a precious resource to be nurtured and a key element of America’s security—emphasizing the parallels between his peace-through-strength doctrine and what he called “NATO’s strategy for peace,” which was and is premised on the idea that NATO must “be strong enough, be determined enough…to stop aggression before it happens.”
Rather than worrying NATO allies, Reagan reassured them by echoing the words of the North Atlantic Treaty: “If our fellow democracies are not secure,” he said, “we cannot be secure. If you are threatened, we’re threatened. If you’re not at peace, we cannot be at peace. An attack on you is an attack on us.”
Reagan grasped NATO’s enduring role and relevance. As post-Soviet Europe began to hemorrhage, Reagan reminded a new generation of leaders, “There is an antidote to chaos…Its name is NATO.” Indeed, Reagan saw NATO as a hedge against uncertainty. Even as Moscow began walking the path of reform, he cautioned, “We cannot afford to mortgage our security to the assessed motives of particular individuals or to the novel approaches of a new leadership…We must stick with the strategy of strength.”
And so, Reagan encouraged and endorsed NATO’s growth as way to enhance America’s security: “Room must be made in NATO for the democracies of Central and Eastern Europe,” he declared, recognizing that helping free nations harden their territory against invasion (as NATO has done since 1949) is wiser and less costly than helping them try to claw it back. “It is better to be here ready to protect the peace,” he intoned at Normandy, “than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost.”
Reagan answered those who claimed that “our allies are not sharing the burden of their own defense” by challenging Americans to “always remember the very real burden our allies bear that we never will. We must remember our allies perform a role that geography has forced upon them. They are literally on the frontlines…Their soldiers, their children, their homes, their civilization itself hang in the balance every day. We cannot, we must not, forget this.”
Finally, rather distorting NATO into a transactional protection racket, Reagan championed NATO as a “community of democratic states” and “a bond which has served us so well over the years and which will continue to be essential to our welfare in the future.”
That bears repeating: The NATO bond serves us.