President Donald Trump meets with NATO Secretary Mark Rutte in the Oval Office, March 13, 2025. (Photo credit: wikicommons/The White House)
In recent weeks, a familiar reflex has taken hold among commentators on both sides of the Atlantic: panic. President Donald Trump’s reckless talk about Greenland, his disdainful rhetoric toward NATO allies and his erratic style have prompted a flood of commentary declaring the trans-Atlantic alliance all but finished and the postwar world order effectively dead.
The anxiety is understandable. Trump’s conduct is destabilizing. Allies are right to be unsettled by a U.S. president who treats alliances as transactional, diplomacy as theater and international norms as optional. But it is a mistake to confuse volatility with collapse — and a greater mistake to assume that Trump’s words represent America’s permanent direction.
We are going to have to live with Trump’s mercurial presidency for the next three years. There will be more bumps, more rhetorical landmines and more moments when allies brace for impact. But history suggests that America’s fundamentals — institutional, economic, military and political — will not be remade by one presidency, no matter how disruptive.
That distinction matters. Trump’s flirtation with acquiring Greenland was extraordinary, even alarming. Yet what followed was also revealing: no invasion, no treaty rupture, no withdrawal from NATO, no abandonment of U.S. forces in Europe. After diplomatic backlash and internal constraint, the administration retreated. This pattern — bluster followed by limits — is not comforting, but it is not evidence of systemic collapse.
Much of the current commentary treats Trumpism as destiny rather than as a phase. It assumes that because Trump questions NATO, NATO is therefore ending; that because America’s attention is divided, Europe is suddenly on its own; that because U.S. rhetoric is harsher, U.S. commitments are void. That logic does not hold.
NATO today is not a hollow shell. It is larger than at any point in its history, with new members brought in precisely because Russian aggression has reminded Europe why collective defense matters. European defense spending is rising, coordination is deepening and deterrence — while imperfect — has held. None of this looks like an alliance in its final days.
Nor is Europe’s growing talk of “strategic autonomy” a sign of divorce. It is, in many ways, the long-overdue maturation of a partnership that Americans across the political spectrum have encouraged for decades. A Europe that can do more for its own defense strengthens NATO; it does not bury it.
There is also a danger in overstating the permanence of Trump’s worldview. Even if his instincts resonate with parts of the electorate, they do not erase Congress, the military chain of command, the foreign policy bureaucracy, treaty law, or the likelihood that a future administration will actively work to repair alliances — as has happened before after periods of strain.
World order is not undone by rhetoric alone. It erodes through sustained policy choices over time. What we are witnessing now is real disruption, not irreversible rupture.
The responsible response is vigilance without fatalism; adaptation without surrender to panic. Allies should hedge, prepare and press Washington where necessary — but they should not write NATO’s obituary every time Trump takes to social media.
Trump is not America. And this moment, unsettling as it is, does not mark the end of the trans-Atlantic project. Overreaction risks becoming its own form of damage — one we cannot afford.