I was on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal this morning, taking calls after the Ankara summit. Full segment is above. I’ve written earlier about why the summit itself was a low bar, cleared. Here I want to do something different: correct the record, point by point, on the claims driving the debate about NATO right now — because most of them don’t survive contact with the facts.
Trump says the U.S. spends a trillion dollars a year defending Europe from Russia. It doesn’t.
The U.S. defense budget funds U.S. global security — the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific, the Western Hemisphere. Treating the entire number as a subsidy to Europe is simply wrong.
Trump says the U.S. used to pay 100% of NATO. It never did.
On the common-funded budget — the part all members jointly pay into — the U.S. share has gone from 22% to 15%. Never 100%. Not once in 77 years.
Trump says Europe “hasn’t been there for us.” Check the record.
NATO has invoked Article 5 — an attack on one is an attack on all — exactly once. September 12, 2001. To defend the United States. NATO AWACS patrolled American skies. European troops fought and died in Afghanistan for twenty years, addressing a threat to us, not to them. That’s not nothing. That’s the whole point of the alliance working as designed.
On Ukraine, the caller’s framing was backwards, and I said so on air.
This war started when Russia invaded Ukraine — a violation of the basic post-1945 rule that borders don’t change by force. There was no serious surrender on the table in early 2022; Zelenskyy never indicated he was ready to give up Ukrainian territory. Within three months, Ukraine had pushed Russian forces out of roughly 10% of occupied territory — using Javelins they’d purchased before the war, not Western largesse manufactured after. The drones hitting Russian oil infrastructure today are Ukrainian-built, Ukrainian-innovated — so effective that Gulf states and the U.S. are now buying the technology from Kyiv. NATO isn’t shooting. Ukrainians are defending their own country, and for the last eighteen months, doing it with European money, not American. If anything, the mistake has been giving too little, too slowly — not too much.
Why does any of this matter? Because the underlying case for NATO isn’t sentimental — it’s a lesson written in American blood, twice.
We were pulled into two European wars in the twentieth century — 1917, 1941 — because we discovered, at enormous cost, that American security is not separable from what happens in Europe. FDR’s answer, carried forward by every administration since, Democratic and Republican, was to prevent the next war rather than fight it: alliances, not aftermaths. NATO, signed in 1949, has been the most successful application of that lesson in modern history. It used to be self-evident. Polling from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs — which I used to run, and which has tracked this for over fifty years — shows American support for NATO is strong. The country understands this even when the rhetoric coming out of Washington suggests otherwise.
None of this is an argument against Europe doing more. It should. I’ve made that case elsewhere and will keep making it. But “doing more” and “the U.S. has been swindled by its closest allies” are two different claims, and only one of them is true.
