Donald Trump has never liked the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato). Disagreements have been managed before and problems deferred, but his recent rage at Nato over what he sees as a lack of support for his war against Iran is now threatening to bring the issue to a head.

When he was still a candidate for the Republican party’s presidential nomination in March 2016, Trump made his feelings clear to The Washington Post:

Nato is costing us a fortune, and yes, we’re protecting Europe with Nato, but we’re spending a lot of money.

Nato is costing us a fortune, and yes, we’re protecting Europe with Nato, but we’re spending a lot of money.

His objections were and are typically Trumpian: he sees other countries taking advantage of the United States, American goodwill and generosity being exploited and insufficient fealty being paid to him. It is undoubtedly true that other member states for decades underspent on defence in the knowledge that America’s military dominance would be a backstop. It is also true that the US provided the overwhelming majority of the alliance’s total defence expenditure (though that has fallen from 72 per cent in 2017 to 59 per cent last year).

Nato is not an all-purpose alliance

Nato is not an all-purpose alliance

It is also clearly the case that President Trump’s notion of Nato is hazy at best. In May 2017, he made the charge that several member states ‘owe massive amounts of money from past years’. He spoke as if the alliance had a central fund into which members paid, whereas in fact there is only a relatively small direct budget for central operating costs like permanent headquarters, command systems and shared logistics, including joint airfields and communications networks. This........

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