Crises can arise anywhere, but Russia today in no position to threaten Western Europe as a whole

The problems of the Western Alliance have not been caused by oversensitive hurt feelings and are not an appropriate subject for the kind of name-calling that has gone on both by and against the United States. That country has embarked on a timely and carefully considered strategic reorientation which is summarised in the 2025 National Security Strategy and 2026 National Defence Strategy statements and the foreign policy summary known as Project 2025. The gap that has developed is between those who have understood those documents and adjusted policy to accommodate them and those who have not.

The basis of the new American foreign policy is that the United States will defend its homeland and its interests in the Western Hemisphere and will deter China in the Indo-Pacific through a policy of strength but not antagonism or confrontation, and it will increase and reward burden-sharing with allies to enter fully into the spirit of such an association all over the world. In the 2026 National Defence Strategy, Defence Secretary Hegseth summarised these changes in the introductory paragraph, emphasising the points just named, and added: “For too long, the US government neglected – even rejected – putting Americans and their concrete interests first. Previous administrations squandered our military advantages and the lives, goodwill, and resources of our people in grandiose nation-building projects and self-congratulatory pledges to uphold cloud castle abstractions like the rules-based international order.”

The secretary asserted that this was not isolationism but an authentic strategic approach “to the threats the nation faced, based on a flexible and practical realism”. This and the other documents expressed the strongly held opinions of the Trump administration that wealthy and sophisticated allies who are capable of assuming primary responsibility for their defence should do so, and The Hague commitment of June 2025 under which NATO members pledged five per cent of GDP on defence by 2035 is stated to be the new standard for adequate participation. This and other documents promised “more favourable treatment on commercial matters, technology sharing, and defence procurement” with those countries that adjusted to these new goals. The national defence strategy explicitly promised to prioritise cooperation and engagements with model allies –  those who are spending as they need to meet threats in their regions with critical but limited US support  – including through arms sales, defence-industrial collaboration, intelligence sharing, and other activities that leave our nations better off. There is a clear gulf between those who responded favourably and those who have declined this policy choice.

The only NATO country to date that has passed the American litmus test of being a reliable ally is Poland. Its defence budget was almost five per cent of GDP in 2025, and this is a bipartisan nationally endorsed position in Poland endorsed by both major parties. As a country that was abolished by the joint annexations of its larger neighbours in the 18^th century and was only revived after World War I and then had six years of murderous occupation by the Nazis and 45 years under Stalin and his successors, the Poles do not require any encouragement about burden-sharing. The Romanians and the small Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, as well as Finland are, for similar reasons, in essentially as good odour in Washington as allies that pull their weight and are reliable.

NATO was set up to protect Western Europe from being overrun by the Soviet Union as the United States under Roosevelt and his successors recognised that it would be geopolitically dangerous if all of Western Europe was in the hands of an aggressive enemy of democracy, not because the Americans had suddenly discovered an inexhaustible wellspring of enthusiasm for the piffle of a “rules-based world”. Russia today, after wallowing in about 20 per cent of Ukraine for longer than the Nazi-Soviet war of 1941 to 1945, is in no position to threaten Western Europe as a whole. Crises are apt to arise anywhere, such as now in the Persian Gulf, and what interests the United States has allies in the general cause of strategic stabilisation for the democratic world. The United Arab Emirates, and Japan, and Argentina are now all better and closer allies of the United States than any of the NATO countries except those that were just mentioned. And they are all being rewarded, Japan with joint scientific research and military production, the UAE with defence assistance and joint projects and Argentina with substantial financial assistance as president Javier Milei drags that splendid country out of the pale of 70 years of Peronist demagogy and extravagance.

If NATO is not going to allow the United States to use its airspace and its own airbases in Europe in attacking Iran, it is not really an alliance. There is no point in an alliance that equates the country that made the difference in World War I and led the allies to victory in World War II and the free world to victory in the Cold War, to Iran, the world’s leading terrorism-sponsoring country. The Europeans with the French and British nuclear deterrent can ultimately hold their own against Russia. If Canada does not alter its attitudes to new circumstances, it will resemble nothing so much as Greenland.