“You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”
No, these are not just the lyrics to Destiny Child’s hit single, “Bills, Bills, Bills.” This blunt statement was made in January 2025 by President Donald Trump as he expressed his frustration with the United States’s outsized role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—one of the world’s most influential international alliances of the past century.
Composed of 32 member states across Europe and North America, NATO is the largest peacetime military alliance in the world. The foundation of NATO is Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which states that an attack on one member is considered an attack on all. And, because the United States is undoubtedly NATO’s strongest military power, its membership is crucial to the strength of the alliance.
Article 5 has only been invoked one time in NATO’s history as a response to the September 11 attacks against the United States. Besides this, NATO’s collective defense pact has successfully deterred aggression from adversaries for decades, preventing Article 5 from being used in the first place.
The pledge that the world’s strongest military will infallibly defend its allies has kept security threats—most notably, from Russia—at bay for decades. However, President Trump’s recent skepticism towards America’s heavy involvement in NATO has etched cracks into this promise.
When asked by a NATO member if he would protect them even if they did not increase defense spending, Trump recounted replying that he would not. “In fact, I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want,” Trump said.
The rationale for his statement is clear: the United States defense budget comprises over half the entire alliance’s military expenditure. Washington also funds a whopping 15.8% of NATO’s yearly overall expenses—tying Germany for the most of any member state.
However, the issue of unequal spending is not the root cause of tensions between the United States and the rest of NATO. Previous presidents have long raised concerns about fiscal inequities, such as President Obama, who warned NATO members that the United States “cannot do it alone” in 2014. The difference is in Trump’s rhetoric, which has raised questions about American commitment to NATO.
Professor Christoph Mikulaschek of Harvard’s Department of Government explained that spending levels will continue to be a hot-button issue in NATO. “A key topic on the agenda of the upcoming NATO summit will be the question [of] whether the alliance needs to update its current guideline to commit 2% of their national GDP to defense spending,” Mikulashek said. “The U.S. advocates a much higher target, and European NATO members are divided. NATO will likely raise its target, but by how much is TBD.”
While NATO has set a goal for all its member states to spend 2% of their GDP on defense, eight members still fall short: Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Slovenia, and Spain. Now, Trump is pushing for a massive increase to 5%, a level of military allocation some analysts say is politically and economically unfeasible for many member states. For reference, the United States currently budgets 3.38% of its real GDP to defense—meaning Washington would need to boost military spending by almost 50% to meet Trump’s target.
However, Trump’s frustrations may not just be that America’s allies are not paying enough. They could stem from his “America First” narrative—his belief that America has bent over backward to help other countries when it should be preserving resources for itself. “I’m not sure we should be spending anything, but we should certainly be helping [member states]… We’re protecting them. They’re not protecting us,” Trump told reporters in January.
Kendall Carll ’26, a former team lead at the NATO Innovation Fund, suggests there might be more to Trump’s reasoning: “Trump’s thesis of the case for his relationship with NATO is based on two things,” Carll said. “One is that the European theater is now less important to American national security interests than it was in years before…This is definitely not an inaccurate assumption of the state of the world—it’s something that a lot of scholars and analysts tend to agree on. The difference is the way Trump is suggesting to go about it.”
Whatever the rationale, Trump’s confrontational rhetoric towards NATO is nothing new. At a 2018 rally in West Virginia, Trump recounted an interaction with the president of a NATO member state. “Yes, I will leave if you don’t pay our bills!” he said. The New York Times also reported that Trump privately stated his desire to withdraw from NATO “several times” during his first term.
However, Harvard students and faculty interviewed by the Independent all agreed that full-scale American withdrawal from NATO is unlikely.
Carll believes that Trump’s first term may be a clue that his aggressive statements may not materialize into a full-scale withdrawal. “To the extent Trump actually believes that pulling out of NATO would be a good thing, I think we would have seen that exact rhetoric in [his] second administration,” he said. “He didn’t hesitate to say it in the first one, so we shouldn’t expect him to hesitate to say it now if he believes it.”
“I think the way to understand Trump’s threats on the U.S. leaving NATO [is] more as a bargaining tool. This is what he thinks is part of the art of the deal, to threaten [allies] with the worst…and hope that spurs them into increased defense spending,” Carll continued.
Although Professor Steven Chaudoin of Harvard’s Department of Government agrees that withdrawal is not likely, he is still uncertain. “There are fewer and fewer voices that Trump listens to who view Russia as a threat,” he stated. “I would still think that full withdrawal is unlikely because Europeans can make promises to increase spending that would placate Trump.”
But even if the United States remains a member of NATO, Trump’s actions will not be met without a response. Dr. Michael Miner, a program manager and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, believes that NATO’s European members will have to engage in discourse soon. “There will be a spirited debate on what the future of European security looks like with the U.S. playing a lesser role than the past,” he said.
“Issues on the horizon include the question [of] whether the number of U.S. troops in Europe will go down, whether and which NATO members will offer security guarantees to Ukraine…and closer cooperation among European countries on defense planning and procurement,” Mikulaschek added.
On the other hand, Trump’s inflammatory comments may undermine cohesion within NATO. Chaudoin said that Trump’s frustration with American involvement in NATO would “absolutely make the norm of Article Five—mutual defense—weaker.”
The Trump administration’s foreign policy “has deeply offended and hurt the Europeans in ways that might not be easily reconcilable, and has shown to the world that [the concept of] the Western world united in the defense of Western values, basic notions of sovereignty and international norms, has been significantly weakened,” Carll said. “It could provide incentives for some of America and Europe’s adversaries to try to test that relationship, to pull Europe away from the United States and the United States away from Europe in a way that makes both weaker and more vulnerable.”
Either way, Trump’s rhetoric will likely elicit a change in NATO’s operation. “There are opportunities for serious progress[,] but also the prospect of causing irreparable harm depending on how events [play out] in Ukraine and Eastern Europe,” Miner said. “Time will tell.”
Ishaan Tewari ’28 (itewari@college.harvard.edu) is interested in the intersection of foreign policy and Beyoncé.