The West’s Unity Is Temporary

As Joe Biden meets with European counterparts in Brussels today, the leader of an ostensibly reunited free world, it is worth recalling another NATO summit just five years ago, held under very different circumstances, with a very different U.S. president.

In 2017, ahead of talks with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Donald Trump arrived in the Belgian capital. He was on the rampage over European free riding, German double-dealing, and European Union tariffs on American companies, at one point getting his national security adviser, John Bolton, on the line. “Are you ready to play in the big leagues today?” Trump asked. The president said he would threaten to leave NATO unless every country in the alliance committed to spending 2 percent of its GDP on defense and Germany scrapped a pipeline deal with Moscow.

In Trump’s mind, the United States was being asked to defend Europe from Russia, while Europe enriched Russia by buying its oil and gas. At the same time, the EU was to him a protectionist trade bloc competing with, and making life difficult for, American firms. Where was the U.S. national interest in continuing this charade? After he took his seat at the summit, Trump summoned Bolton over to his table. “Are we going to do it?” he asked. Bolton urged him not to. “I returned to my seat not knowing what he was going to do,” he writes in The Room Where It Happened.

The president ultimately did not follow through on his plan, and the alliance held. With his successor now in town to discuss the Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an assault that has suddenly reinvigorated NATO, it is easy to forget the disharmony of the Trump years, all that led up to it, and the very real prospect that Trump or one of his ideological acolytes could be back in the White House by 2025. Trump, after all, was far from the first American to complain about Europe’s lack of commitment to Western security: Barack Obama had criticized NATO members for being “free riders,” while Europe and the U.S. had split badly over Iraq.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, however, and Germany’s revolution in its foreign policy—finally putting on hold the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and committing to the 2 percent defense-spending target—it can appear as though Putin has succeeded where Obama and Trump failed. And so, after the years of Trumpian disorder, all is well, right? The West, thanks to Russian aggression, has finally reunited and rebalanced, ready to challenge authoritarians everywhere. Don’t bet on it. The problems in the Western alliance run far deeper than technocratic complaints about defense budgets and gas pipelines, or even the brooding figure of Trump himself.

When faced with an invasion, as we are seeing in Ukraine, NATO members have found unity to be easy: Core national interests are at stake. But as the current sense of shock and disgust gives way to the usual pressures of political and economic cycles, does the West agree on what lessons should be drawn from this crisis? Does it collectively know what it stands for—and whom it stands against?

During the Cold War, these questions had relatively clear answers. The West was…