Can NATO survive without the United States?

What is NATO without US funding and backing? Can the military alliance survive without US as Prez Trump warns that he is pulling out as he did with WHO and is threatening to quit the UN.
USA has been the spine of the military alliance North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), which binds many European countries together against external aggression by outsiders with strong American backing for over eight decades. Now that US President Donald Trump has threatened to pull out of the military alliance as he did with the UN’s WHO and threatening to quit UN as its “packed with left radicals, what is the future of NATO without the funds of the US or its military backing.

“Europe is staring down the barrel of a stark new reality where the United States being the backbone of NATO – the alliance that has guaranteed the continent’s security for almost 80 years – is no longer a given”, according to military strategists.

President Donald Trump’s public animosity towards Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, his willingness to embrace Russia’s Vladimir Putin and recent comments casting doubt over whether he would defend NATO allies “if they don’t pay” have all forced European leaders to start thinking the previously unthinkable – is the US a reliable security partner at a time when the continent is being rocked by its biggest war since the 1940s?

Posing this question, a defence analyst Brad Lendon, asks: ” NATO without the US is far from impotent, with more than a million troops and modern weaponry at its disposal from the 31 other countries in the alliance. It also has the wealth and technological knowhow to defend itself without the US.
Donald Trump, on his victorious campaign trail in the US during the November 2024 elections that returned him for a second time to the white house, has been maintaining a consistent stand that unless every country in the military alliance decides to depend at least 2% of its GDP on defence, the US is not going to support the military alliance. This forced the NATO alliance to do a rethink how a new security net was built within the European countries without the backing of the US.

The US and Germany are the biggest contributors to NATO’s military budget, civil budget and security investment program, at almost 16% each, followed by the UK at 11% and France at 10%, a NATO fact sheet says. Analysts say it wouldn’t take much for Europe to make up for the loss of Washington’s contribution.

If European countries unite and buy the right equipment, Europe “could pose a serious conventional and … nuclear deterrent” to Russia, Ben Scherer, Europe executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), said in a Zoom call with CNN and other journalists in late February.
“Europe alone (still has) a capacity to muster the resources it would need to defend itself; it’s just a question of whether (it is) willing to,” Scherer said. And that’s the key question. Over more than 75 years and the administrations of 14 different US presidents, including the first Trump administration, the US has been the sinew that has kept the alliance together, says Brendon.
During the Cold War, US troops on the continent were there as a deterrent to any Soviet ambitions to expand the Warsaw Pact alliance and eventually saw out its end when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. NATO campaigns in the Balkans in the 1990s were conducted with US troops and airpower. And, until the second Trump administration took office on January 20, Washington spearheaded aid for Ukraine.

Those decades of trans-Atlantic solidarity may have come to an end in recent days, analysts say.
Many EU countries are worried over the fragile nature of NATO if the US were to quit the military alliance, and Ukraine peace deal were to end in Russia’s favour. What is the guarantee that Russia would not invade the Balkan states as it did with Ukraine in the near future, and how will NATO defend these states without the US backing and prevent the predicted conflict escalating into a World War III type situation, which Trump has been warning about.

Trump’s Oval Office blow-up with Zelensky – after which he halted US aid to Kyiv – “felt like a deeper rupture, not just with Ukraine, but with the US ‘free world’ strategy from Truman through Reagan,” Dan Fried, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former US assistant secretary of state for Europe, said on the council’s website.
John Lough, a former NATO official who is now an associate fellow at the Chatham House think tank in London, sees an even more profound split in the alliance. “It simply feels that the United States sees Europe more as a competitor, a rival, than an ally,” Lough said adding that because of that the commitment for Washington to defend NATO allies is somewhat in doubt.

It’s a fracture that Lough sees as unrepairable.
But some analysts say a NATO without the US is not a bad idea. “As soon as US allies become convinced that they can no longer trust in US capabilities to defend them when push comes to shove, they will rush to pick up the slack and work towards growing their own capabilities,” Moritz Graefrath, a postdoctoral fellow in security and foreign policy at William & Mary’s Global Research Institute, wrote in War on the Rocks last year.
“It is in this sense that — perhaps counterintuitively — a withdrawal of US forces will create an even stronger, not weaker, Europe,” Graefrath wrote.
Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, a key member of NATO, Hitler’s first target in World War II and now a potential target of a predicted World War III of Putin, thinks this process has started already. “Europe as a whole is truly capable of winning any military, financial, economic confrontation with Russia – we are simply stronger,” he said ahead of a European Union summit this week. “We just had to start believing in it. And today it seems to be happening.”
What does Europe have?

In concept, a European military could be formidable. Türkiye has NATO’s largest armed forces after the United States, with 355,200 active military personnel, according to the Military Balance 2025, compiled by the IISS. It’s followed by France (202,200), Germany (179,850), Poland (164,100), Italy (161,850), the United Kingdom (141,100), Greece (132,000) and Spain (122,200).
Turkey also has the most army personnel, which make up of the majority of frontline ground troops, with 260,200, France (113,800), Italy (94,000), Greece (93,000), Poland (90,600) the UK (78,800), Spain (70,200) and Germany (60,650), according to the IISS report.
In contrast, there were about 80,000 US troops assigned or deployed to bases in NATO countries as of June 2024, a July 2024 report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) says. Most of those US’s troops are in Germany (35,000), Italy (12,000) and the UK (10,000), the CRS says.

Some of the larger NATO nations also have weapons equal to or many times better than what Russia has. Take aircraft carriers for instance. While Russia has a single, antiquated aircraft carrier, the UK alone has two modern carriers capable of launching F-35B stealth fighters. France, Italy and Spain field aircraft carriers or amphibious ships capable of launching fighter jets, according to the Military Balance.
Aside from the US, France and the UK maintain nuclear forces, with both deploying ballistic missile submarines.
The NATO allies besides the US have about 2,000 fighter and ground-attack jets among them, with dozens of new F-35 stealth jets included in that number.
Ground forces include modern tanks, including German Leopards and British Challengers, donated units of which are now serving in the Ukrainian military. European NATO countries can field powerful cruise missiles, like the joint Franco-British SCALP/Storm Shadow, which has also proven itself on the Ukrainian battlefield.