As the members of North Atlantic Treaty prepare to mark next week the alliance’s 75th birthday, it’s hard to know whom the allies see as a bigger threat — President Putin or President Trump. What else to make of the recent obsession with “Trump-proofing”? Such proofing is needed, a former American envoy says, because the alliance “is bound to be disrupted” by a re-elected Trump, “who is not interested” in “being managed himself or managing an alliance.”

Talk about missing the big picture. The alliance’s fretting about a possible second Trump term prompted the 32-nation group to choose as its new secretary general the outgoing Dutch premier, Mark Rutte. That choice was at the behest of the Biden administration, Politico reports. “Former NATO officials and U.S. diplomats,” Politico says, contend “the alliance may need Rutte to be battle ready if Donald Trump wins back the presidency.”

Rather than taking a militant posture toward the possible leader of the free world come November, wouldn’t it behoove the Europeans sheltering under the umbrella of American military might to get themselves more “battle ready” for the prospect of renewed aggression from Mr. Putin? That points to the real concern Europe has with Trump: money. Trump insists that NATO members contribute more to their common defense. 

That was a démarche of Trump’s first term. By 2020, America’s NATO allies were spending some $313 billion a year on defense, up $50 billion from 2016 — an amount that exceeds France’s defense budget. “President Trump got our allies to increase their NATO spending by demanding they pay up,” a campaign representative says. That was partly a matter of getting the NATO allies to meet their pledges of spending annually on defense 2 percent of GDP.

Trump’s rhetoric may not have been as decorous as the Europeans like. He recently warned “delinquent” NATO members that “I would not protect you,” and, in re Russia, “I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.” While such vain boasts prompted a round of trans-Atlantic hand-wringing, they are best viewed in the context of Trump’s hyperbolic negotiation tactics, which already yielded more spending by our allies.

The cost of NATO has been a concern of the New York Sun ever since the alliance was founded. In April 1949, before the pact was even ratified, the Sun, in an editorial headlined “First Knocks on the Counting-room Door,” noted that, “just as expected, the European nations that signed the pact have begun to ask for material and financial aid.” The sums involved, the Sun predicted, “will not be modest.” The paper has long been wary of big spending.

A later Sun editorial wondered “how much material aid” America would have to “give to its allies to back up the Atlantic Pact.” The Sun noted that the “already burdensome costs of maintaining our national defenses will be increased by something like $1,000,000,000 a year” — when the whole defense budget was but $11 billion — as a result of the pact. Yet the Sun took pains to note that America would not bear the sole burden of trans-Atlantic defense.

Another Sun editorial endorsed General Omar Bradley’s view that NATO will be “as important to American national security as possession of the atomic bomb.” Even so, “the pact clearly means,” the Sun averred, “that the European nations which have signed it will look to their own defenses, but that they may count upon supplemental material aid from across the Atlantic.” Somehow, this formula almost seems to have gotten flipped in later years. 

As Senator Vandenberg put it then, America needed to expend the spondulix on its overseas allies because “we are the final target, though other independent peoples are in nearer jeopardy.” NATO’s 75th anniversary is an apt moment for a larger discussion not only about the raison d’être of the alliance, which has since the end of the Cold War suffered from a degree of mission confusion, but of the need to share among all of its members the burdens of defense.