Many of the procurement deals, meanwhile, are likely to be repackaged. Allies have less political or fiscal space to offer Trump major new pledges, the same two diplomats said. In reality, they are offering Trump \u201cvery little,\u201d said Niehus. \u201cThere is no big deliverable.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Major transformation\u2019<\/p>\n
Yet behind the scenes, allies feel the days of NATO’s unfettered appeasement of the U.S. president are numbered.<\/p>\n
Europe and Canada still only account for 41 percent of NATO\u2019s total defense spending<\/a> \u2014 although that skews in Washington\u2019s favor because the U.S. has vast defense spending unrelated to Europe. Washington also has unique capabilities like intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance, and air-to-air refueling alongside its nuclear umbrella.\u00a0<\/p>\n But as non-U.S. defense spending grows, so will allied self-confidence. \u201cThis is the biggest transformation of NATO in history \u2026 I\u2019m not sure everyone understands that in the U.S. administration,\u201d said the first senior NATO diplomat. \u201cThey\u2019re so used to leading,\u201d they said, but that may change \u201cin the coming years.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, that\u2019s already happening. A U.K.-led grouping of around a dozen countries is set to announce a new coalition<\/a> to develop deep precision strike capabilities at Ankara, despite skepticism from U.S. officials <\/a>who warn long-range missiles increase the risk of escalation with Russia. <\/p>\n Europeans may also start being more demanding with Washington in shifting military assets across the alliance and in drafting war plans in NATO\u2019s next four-year planning cycle, the two diplomats said. <\/p>\n \u201cWe need the Americans, [we will] be diplomatic, listen to what they say, try to be gentle,\u201d said Francken. But \u201cwe need to be more pragmatic and always think what is in our interests.\u201d<\/p>\n Megan Messerly contributed reporting from Washington and Hans von der Burchard contributed reporting from Berlin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Many of the procurement deals, meanwhile, are likely to be repackaged. Allies have less political or fiscal space…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7073,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[585,46,2333,60,57,722,8,3705,534,2942,649,156,299,66,462,7,210,21,328,463,20,281,2625,1092,910,3682,4236,466,39,49,130,464,222],"class_list":["post-7072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-albania","tag-canada","tag-czech-republic","tag-defense","tag-donald-trump","tag-european-defense","tag-france","tag-gitanas-nauseda","tag-greenland","tag-industry","tag-intelligence","tag-iran","tag-mark-rutte","tag-military","tag-missiles","tag-nato","tag-nato-summit","tag-nuclear-weapons","tag-pete-hegseth","tag-procurement","tag-russia","tag-security","tag-slovenia","tag-space","tag-spain","tag-surveillance","tag-theo-francken","tag-turkey","tag-united-kingdom","tag-united-states","tag-war","tag-war-in-iran","tag-war-in-ukraine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7072\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}