NATO today comprises 32 member states, a number that has grown considerably since the alliance’s founding in 1949. The original twelve signatories were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They were subsequently joined by Greece and Turkey (1952), West Germany (1955), Spain (1982), Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic (1999), Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania (2004), Croatia and Albania (2009), Montenegro (2017), North Macedonia (2020), Finland (2023), and Sweden (2024).

The alliance’s founding logic was clear: a collective defense architecture to check Soviet expansionism. The question now before serious observers of American foreign policy is whether that logic continues to hold, and whether the United States should remain inside an arrangement that was designed for a world that no longer exists.

I. The Original Rationale Has Expired

NATO was created to counter the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet-led military alliance established in 1955. In July 1991, the Warsaw Pact was formally dissolved in Prague, ending thirty-six years of military organization. The Soviet Union itself followed five months later. The Cold War, in its classical formulation, was over.

An alliance created to counter a specific adversary must at minimum re-examine its purpose when that adversary ceases to exist. NATO did not do so. Instead it persisted, expanded, and in the decades that followed assumed new missions: peacekeeping in the Balkans, operations in Afghanistan, support for counterterrorism. These missions represent institutional inertia as much as strategic design. The case for American membership in NATO was compelling in 1949. Its basis in 2025 requires a fresh argument, not merely inherited assumptions.

II. NATO Has Moved East

A second and underappreciated argument concerns NATO’s geographic expansion. Multiple former members of the Warsaw Pact have since become members of NATO. The eastward march of the alliance has absorbed Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Albania. Finland and Sweden, long neutral, joined in 2023 and 2024. NATO’s frontier has moved to within striking distance of Russia’s border.

One need not be an apologist for Moscow to acknowledge the obvious: this expansion, viewed from the other side, looks exactly like what Western governments would find intolerable in reverse. Ask any honest American strategist how Washington would have responded had Warsaw Pact nations absorbed Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean between 1993 and 2004. They would not have been pleased. The double standard is worth noting, if not resolving.

III. The Defense Burden Has Not Been Shared Fairly

A third argument concerns the systematic free-riding that has plagued the alliance throughout its history. NATO members have long agreed, at least formally, to spend 2% of GDP on defense. For decades the agreement was honored more in the breach than in the observance. In 2014, only three of the then-28 members met the threshold. By 2023, the number had reached ten. Only under sustained American pressure, and the shock of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, did European members accelerate their commitments. NATO’s own figures show that in 2024, European allies and Canada had collectively reached 2.02% of GDP, up from 1.43% a decade earlier.

The economic term for this behavior is a textbook tragedy of the commons. Each ally benefits from collective security while rationally seeking to minimize its own contribution, in the expectation that others will bear the burden. Mr. Trump has repeatedly and correctly identified this dynamic. His criticism has not been warmly received. But its substance has not been refuted.

At the June 2025 summit in The Hague, NATO members committed to an even more ambitious new target of 5% of GDP by 2035, with 3.5% directed toward core defense. Whether this pledge will be honored more faithfully than the old one is a question that American taxpayers are right to question.

IV. Article 5 Is Only as Strong as the Will to Invoke It

The animating principle of NATO is Article 5 of the North Atlantic........

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