Does the US still have Europe’s back?
Photographer: Iris van den Broek/AFP/Getty Images
NATO Has Dodged Collapse Before. It’s Never Been This Close.
US presidents have always been skeptical of having to protect Europe, but Trump takes it to a new level.
Why is the globe’s greatest military alliance so often in crisis? President Donald Trump’s reelection last November, and Vice President JD Vance’s deliberately insulting speech in Munich in February, cast the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into grave anxiety. But it’s hardly the first time the alliance has been at risk of falling apart.
NATO remade Europe, and the world, in the decades after its founding in 1949, by bringing peace and security to a continent that had repeatedly touched off global wars. Yet from the beginning, NATO has been a contentious coalition: Its members have been at each other’s throats even as they have also locked arms.