Front Burner - Can NATO survive Trump?

Episode Date: January 27, 2026

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump set off a firestorm with comments dismissing the military contributions of fellow NATO members during the war in Afghanistan. This follows the president’s aggressive bid for Greenland, a self-governing territory of NATO-ally Denmark, which brought into question whether NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, could survive without America, its strongest and richest member. And while some kind of agreement on Greenland now seems to be on the table, and Trump appears to be backing down, today we’re asking what damage has already been done to NATO. How does this latest challenge to its existence compare to conflicts the military alliance has faced before? Aaron Ettinger, a professor of political science at Carleton University, joins us for a conversation about how NATO’s past and present could inform its future.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

The firehose of news from America can feel like a lot these days. If you're trying to figure out what to make of it all, we got you. I'm Katie Simpson. And I'm Paul Hunter. We're correspondents here in Washington. Working just around the corner from where much of the action is taking place. Two blocks from the White House. And that's the name of our new podcast. For top-notch analysis of U.S. politics from a Canadian perspective,

find two blocks from the White House every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts. including YouTube. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, everyone. I'm Jamie Poisson. We've never needed them. We have never really asked anything of them. You know, they'll say they send some troops to Afghanistan or this or that. And they did.

They stayed a little back, a little off the front lines. So that was from an interview Donald Trump gave in Davos with Fox News late last week. Coming off a speech where he said NATO has really never given the U.S. anything in return for all that it does. Just to set the record straight here, post 9-11, after Article 5 was invoked, Canada and other NATO countries sent tens of thousands of troops to fight alongside the U.S. in Afghanistan. A third of the casualties came from non-U.S. countries. Canada lost 158 soldiers. Trump's comments came in a time when the relationship between the U.S. and its Western allies couldn't be on shakier ground. In recent weeks, people were getting ready to bid farewell

to one of the pillars of the post-war order, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO. Today in Washington, 12 countries representing 330 million people signed the North Atlantic Security Pact. Twelve countries of the free world lined up against aggression. When Trump made an aggressive bid for Greenland, a self-governing territory of NATO ally Denmark, it brought into question whether NATO could survive without America, its strongest and richest member. And while some kind of agreement on Greenland now seems to be on the table, and Trump seems to be backing down, what damage has already been done? Can NATO weather whatever is next? And how does this latest challenge to its existence compare to conflicts it's faced before? That's what I'm talking about

today with Aaron Eddinger, a professor of political science at Carleton University. Erin, hey, great to have you on Frontburner. Thank you so much. Okay, so let's start with a bit of a history lesson because I think it will really help ground the conversation about the current challenges that NATO is facing. In the aftermath of the Second World War, we see the creation of institutions that we know to be part of the post-war order like the United Nations, the International Court of Justice. Then in 1949, the agreement to form NATO is signed, a military and political alliance made up of 10, European nations, along with Canada and the U.S. First to sign was Belgium.

Next, Canada. The other 10 countries followed in order. Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and finally, the United States. Over the last 76 years, we saw it grow to 32 member states, but what was its original purpose? Well, the original purpose of NATO was rather uncertain. I mean, we have to think back to the 1940s, the late 1940s, and remember that none of this was inevitable.

In common imagination, we think, okay, World War II ended, then all of a sudden it's the Cold War with the United Nations and NATO. But, you know, that wasn't the case. NATO evolved out of a series of developments between 1945 and 1949 that were undertaken to shore up the Western European and Transatlantic. in a way that perhaps couldn't have been foreseen in the years prior to that. And so perhaps first and foremost, the reason for NATO was psychological. The purpose of NATO was to re-ignite confidence, to consolidate the ethical and spiritual forces of Western civilization, as Britain's foreign secretary said in 1948. That makes perfect sense, given what was going on in Europe at the time. Like, we've got to remember that, you know, France had been occupied, bombed out, Britain bombed out.

They're on the brink of losing their great power status. If there was any great power status left, there were coups in Czechoslovakia, the communists were on the march. You know, the winter of 1946, 1947 in England was devastating. There were coal shortages, right? Bankruptcy was upon us. And this was psychologically devastating to Western European countries. And so there was a sense that the United States and Western Europe needed to do something to shore up their self-confidence. And over a couple of years, there were a series of kind of bilateral and multilateral mutual defense pacts among Western European countries.

Couple that with investment from the United States as part of the Marshall Plan, the emerging policy of containment that was coming out of the United States. And we have this thing that's emerging. And by 1948, 1949, there are negotiations to create a transatlantic defense pact that we now recognize as NATO. The treaty we are signing here today is evidence of the path they will follow. If there is anything certain today, if there is anything inevitable in the future, it is the will of the people of the world for freedom and for peace. But all of that emerged out of the bargaining and the, circumstances that were unique to the late 1940s.

So we see in the 1950s the Korean War breakout. Here, the Russian-dominated North Koreans launched a full-scale, well-prepared drive on the capital of the South South. The peaceful Southern democracy was taken by surprise by this communist blitzkrieg, culmination of red aims in the Far East that are perfectly clear for all to see. North Korea invades South Korea, and it does accelerate NATO's militarization. And then in the years following, it's this loosely defined Western Defense Pact. But it wasn't in really until the late 60s that they were able to articulate what their political orientation exactly is. And can you tell me about what happens then?

Okay. The Washington Treaty is signed. It is framed in the language of liberalism and democracy. So there is a political dimension to it. But that was largely about the community of democracies that it embodied. into the 1950s, it didn't necessarily mean that everybody got along or got along particularly well. I mean, one of the first major kind of crises of NATO was the Suez Canal crisis, where Britain and France, in conjunction with Israel, invaded the Suez Canal zone in Egypt,

in a sort of a kind of a last ditch grasp at empire. After weeks of stalemate, the Suez crisis burst dramatically into the news again, for Israel has invaded Egypt. Britain and France have declared the canal in danger, and British and French troops are on the move. And the United States didn't want this because the United States was interested in liquidating the empires of the old European powers and establishing this new liberal international order. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union has invaded Hungary, and this is talking about late October, early November, 1956. The Twin City, which is Hungary's capital, is the flashpoint where the fight against Russian domination explodes into bloody river.

And so we have a circumstance where there is seemingly a purpose to NATO of preserving stability and security in Europe. Meanwhile, Britain and France are acting like their 19th century selves. And the interests of the core members of NATO are quite misaligned. And the stakes were extremely high. Now, Britain and France were not nearly strong enough to counteract the pressure of the United States. And so they sort of smartened up and withdrew and that crisis abated. But that was symptomatic of the kind of stuff that we would see take place over the subsequent decades of differential threat perceptions and national interests between the United States and the Western Allies. Now, by the late 1960s, the political objectives of NATO start to become more apparent.

By the 20-year anniversary of NATO, we see the opt-out clause coming into play. By 1969, the original members of NATO had the option of withdrawing. So NATO itself, in anticipation of that, decided to figure out a new purpose for itself. In 1967, a report comes out suggesting that NATO should become both a military defense pact and a forum for doing international engagement, right, with the Soviet Union, with other non-European organizations and actors. And in that regard, NATO gave to itself a much broader political rule more than just being a community of defense and a defense pact among Western European democracies. What was the view at the time on NATO from Russia and the rest of the world? Russia regarded NATO as being a function of American dominance, right? It was viewed within the framework of the Cold War.

NATO itself was probably regarded as a satellite or as a series of vassal states to the United States, probably in the same way that the United States regarded the countries of the Warsaw Pact, the counterpart to NATO enacted by the Soviet Union, as being players on the Soviet Union's team. So this all kind of fell into this binary understanding of the Cold War's logic. So if NATO has positioned itself as in opposition to this real existential threat of the Soviet Union, what happens to NATO after the fall of the Soviet Union? After 1991, after the Soviet Union falls, NATO has to figure out what it's going to do with itself once again, right? Its original purpose seems to have been satisfied, right? And there doesn't seem to be a need for this organization anymore. It doesn't need to deter any Soviet invasion.

But as we all know, it's very difficult to kill a bureaucracy. And so the bureaucracy went out looking for new agendas. It eventually arrived at peacekeeping, peacemaking, and doing security operations out of its ordinary area of operations. Now, the collapse of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s and mid-1990s gave NATO-on. an opportunity to put words into practice by acting as peacekeepers and peacemakers in Bosnia. What we've been doing for the first four months of our tour in Bosnia is peacekeeping and assisting with the peace, but now we're in a position where we can actually add to the peace, we can help to assist NATO to shape that piece.

To knock Slobodan Milosevic out of power in Kosovo in 1999. The first bombing of its kind in NATO history. On March 24, 1999, Western nations carried out their threat against Serbia and began the biggest military conflict on Serbian soil since World War II. NATO saw the war as the only way to end President Slobodan Milosevic's violent crackdown in Kosovo, where his Serb nationalist forces were accused of ethnic cleansing against Kosovo's largely Muslim ethnic Albanian population. And this seemed to be part of its new agenda for the 1990s.

It was going to intervene in these ethnic wars, ethnic conflicts, and make peace and enforce peace. And just Canada was a big part of that, right? Canada was a big part of that. Canada did peacekeeping operations in Bosnia from the mid-90s to 2004. Canada dropped plenty of bombs in Kosovo in 1999. Canada was a full-on enthusiastic participant in these NATO operations. A lot of these smaller states in the Eastern Bloc, they want. want in, right? And how does NATO go about expansion? Tell me more about that. And what was the

broader debate around it for existing members and prospective ones? NATO expansion is probably the most controversial aspect of post-cold war, NATO, right? Because the argument is made right now by many in the United States and beyond is that NATO's encroachment into Russia's backyard prompted counterreaction from Russia, which included the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Expansion, however, in the 1990s, wasn't necessarily regarded by many as being all of that problematic. After all, right, the Soviet Union is dead and gone.

The United States under Bill Clinton wants to pursue a national security strategy of engagement and enlargement, and that included engaging with the countries of the former Soviet bloc and enlarging the scope of its international organizations, which included NATO. NATO enlargement is not directed against anyone. It will advance the security of everyone. NATO's old members, new members, and non-members alike. So by 1999, about three or three new members join. Today we welcome Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, finally erasing the boundary line,

the Cold War artificially imposed on the continent of Europe. followed by a bunch more in 2004. Today we proudly welcome Bulgaria, Estonia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, we welcome them into the ranks of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And it seemed relatively unproblematic. There were some people in the United States who were saying that long term this is not going to be healthy for the relationship between the United States, NATO, and Russia.

But American presidents under Clinton and then under George W. Bush pursued this agenda because it seemed to follow from the logic of American global hegemony in the 1990s. And so they did. I know that some in Russia still look at NATO through a Cold War prison and therefore look at. our proposals to expand it in a negative light. But I asked them to look again. We are building a new NATO just as we are support the Russian people in building a new Russia. Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin were at the time we're also preoccupied with the expansion of NATO's operations. I didn't particularly like the interventions in Bosnia or in Kosovo. And so it's that kind of sideline of Russia as part of the kind of great power politics of the 90s and early 2000s that rubbed them the wrong way.

It didn't seem to accord with their sense of Russia being a great power in the European continent. And so resentment builds and combines with other sense of rising nationalism in Russia. And then into the late 2000s, we start seeing Vladimir Putin becoming much more attentive to the problem of expansion. In 2008, there's a key moment. In 2008 at Bucharest, George W. Bush says, Here in Bucharest, we must make clear that NATO welcomes the aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine for their membership in NATO and offers them a clear path forward to meet that goal. That was a signal moment in all of this. Many countries in NATO said, hold on, George, this is no good.

This isn't going to happen because it's going to antagonize Russia. but that was written into, that statement was written into the Bucharest Summit Declaration and has become one of those points of reference for explaining why Russia has been behaving the way it has been since 2014. It's been said that being neighbors with America is like sleeping with an elephant. One gets affected by every twitch and grunt. Well, these days, there's a lot more than twitches and grunts in dealing with the U.S. I'm Paul Hunter. And I'm Katie Simpson.

We're reporters here in Washington, and every Wednesday will bring you a smart conversation to help you make sense of how American politics are affecting Canada. Our new podcast is called Two Blocks from the White House. Find and follow now wherever you get your podcasts, including YouTube. I want to come back to Russia's illegal incursion into Ukraine in just a minute. But first, I do, I think we have to go back a little bit and do Afghanistan, because I don't want to miss. I don't want to miss that. So after 9-11, NATO invokes Article 5. The Council agreed that if it is determined that this attack was directed from

abroad against the United States, it shall be regarded as an action covered by Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, which states that an armed attack against one or more of the allies in Europe or in North America shall be considered an attack against them all. And NATO countries stayed in Afghanistan for 20 years. So, as I mentioned in the intro, Trump makes these comments about how other NATO countries stayed away from the front line. I just want to note, Canada actually lost its first four soldiers to friendly American fire. tragically on the front lines. So these comments are obviously not true. They have enraged and deeply hurt people who have lost loved ones and people who were injured and whose lives have been

altered. But I just wonder if you could elaborate for me on the role that NATO plays in Afghanistan. Much like the late 1940s, NATO's role in Afghanistan was kind of uncertain from the outset. So in October 2001, the United States intervenes into Afghanistan, in the absence without NATO. NATO would follow about six to 12 months later performing peacekeeping operations and stabilization functions in Kabul. It was only through the 2004, 2005, 2006 period

that NATO would expand its remit within Afghanistan to do the kind of counterterrorism operations that we in Canada associate Canada's role with in that period of time. And yes, indeed, right? The, you know, NATO countries, you know, committed a great deal of blood and treasure to these operations. And over time, the war in Afghanistan became at least as much about NATO solidarity

and fighting alongside one another as it was a matter of doing counterterrorism and rebuilding the country. So NATO, NATO sort of caught in this, this very difficult situation where the war became increasingly unwinnable and the objectives became increasingly difficult to accomplish. But it was really hard to withdraw because nobody wanted to be the first one to step away and say, we're out because it became a matter of alliance unity. In together, out together was the mantra in the early going. And now from our vantage point in 2006, it took 20 years for this thing to resolve itself. And it didn't resolve itself particularly well for NATO. How did members handle the U.S. invasion of Iraq versus the war in Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan, everybody in NATO wanted a part of this. It was kind of a perfect operation for NATO to engage with, right? Because it involved a real security problem, but it also involved many of the ideals that were kicked into NATO and the notions of peacekeeping and peacemaking that it had embraced throughout the 1990s. Iraq was a whole other story, right? Iraq did not pose a clear and present danger to NATO. despite what the George W. Bush administration said, Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly,

yet our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. And so it split the alliance. It split the members of the alliance, we should remember. So the United States and the United Kingdom and the Netherlands were on board with,

the invasion of Iraq, while Germany, France, Canada, and others were not. So this became one of those awkward situations where you have otherwise allies fighting together in Afghanistan, but deeply at odds over Iraq. And to make it even more complicated, NATO would eventually get involved as part of a series of training missions in Iraq. So we have this sort of incoherence with regards to NATO's own policy. And that was just part and parcel of the expanded scope of NATO's operations in the 2000s. So, I mean, I think it's fair to say we're seeing NATO really struggling in kind of the mid-2000s, right, to late 2000s to try and figure out what its purposes and it doesn't actually get a win in Afghanistan. Lots of criticism for its intervention in Libya, which I don't think we have time to get into.

But then Russia goes into Crimea in 2014, but they invade Ukraine in 2022. And then what happens to NATO then? How has the Ukraine war revamped or this kind of flailing alliance? There's a line from the 1970s that they were a British diplomat who said that you could always count on Russia to save NATO from itself. In Afghanistan, you know, NATO ran itself ragged trying to win this unwinnable battle, this unwinnable war. of this unwinnable war. And by the mid-2000s, you know, the NATO seemed to be cracking up. Then comes Russia's incursions into Crimea and into the eastern provinces, the eastern regions

of Ukraine, 2014. And all of a sudden, NATO has a renewed sense of what its purpose is, right, to act as a deterrent against Russia. NATO says it's suspending military and civilian cooperation with Russia over its annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region. It has also ordered military planners to boost defenses and reassure nervous Eastern European countries. Russia's aggression against Ukraine is the gravest threat to European security in a generation. And it challenges our vision of a Europe, whole, free and at peace. By 2022, the tension is just ratcheted up even more.

And so NATO is able to refocus its agendas on Europe and on its near abroad. In that sense, Russia saved NATO from itself once again. Okay, so we see this kind of renewed enthusiasm and purpose for NATO post the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. And how does that change with the election of Donald Trump, essentially? The election of Donald Trump or the re-election of Donald Trump sort of brings to mind one of the original ideas about NATO itself, right? NATO's first secretary general, Lord Ismay, said that the purpose of NATO is to keep the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Russians out. So while, you know, in 226, NATO is concerned with keeping the Russians out of Eastern Europe, they now have to worry about Donald Trump. And Trump's threat to abandon NATO wholesale or even worse, you know, threaten the sovereignty of one of its members, as we saw in the Greenland affair.

But this would not be a threat to NATO. This would greatly enhance the security of the entire alliance, the NATO alliance. The United States is treated. very unfairly by NATO. I want to tell you that. And when you think about it, nobody can dispute it. We give so much and we get so little in return. This is new, right?

This is new for NATO, for Western European NATO and Canada. There have been spats over the past 75 years, but never anything quite like this. Because in 2006, it seems as if the United States represents one of the great threats to the NATO alliance on the western end of the alliance itself, it's geographical territory. And so Britain, Canada, France, NATO itself has to be concerned about the threat of abandonment from the United States, which would have all sorts of cascading problems for the alliance. You know, this deal that they seem to have reached, or this framework of a deal that they seem to have reached,

There's reporting in the New York Times that some anonymous officials have said that one idea being discussed is Denmark seeding sovereignty or some parts of Greenland where the U.S. can build military basis. It's a step back from Trump's initial bid to have full ownership and control, but there's still a lot of tension, right? The Danish Prime Minister is saying we can negotiate all political aspects, security investment, the economy, but we cannot negotiate our sovereignty. The Danish Defense Minister also says, that NATO Secretary General Mark Routé can't negotiate on Denmark's behalf. And like, how are you thinking about the way this apparent deal is being reached and how it's affecting the alliance right now? This strikes me as being, you know, some kind of search for a face-saving compromise, right? Trump, you know, drew a red line and he withdrew from it. And so, you know, we all know that Donald Trump is ultra-sensitive to the way he comes across. And so some sort of face-saving bargain is probably in the works, at least from the Washington side of things.

Now, Denmark's statements about not-seating sovereignty seem pretty categorical to me. How this plays out, nobody knows because we've never been in this kind of situation before. Even if they can kind of muddle their way through this, like how much damage do you think has already been done here? A ton of damage. You know, the United States for almost all of NATO's existence existed as the overarching coordinator, the trustworthy central pillar of NATO. So, you know, France and Britain could go off on their little side adventures here and there or withdraw from the integrated command or the partners could snipe at each other about who pays what and who does what in Afghanistan. The United States remained the central stabilizing pillar of this NATO order. Without that stabilizing pillar, right? The confidence that Western Europe, that NATO partners can have in the organization itself is really, really shaky. Where do you think NATO goes from here, given everything that we've talked about today, given the fact that this latest challenge is so much different than the challenges you've laid out for us that the alliance has faced in its history? and given that its strongest member is so unreliable

and is using these tools of integration against its own allies. Where does NATO go from here? Well, I think the answer to that depends on what Donald Trump does. NATO is wildly popular. You know, in Europe and in Canada, it has, you know, supermajority support across most, if not all of the NATO countries. It is expanded. It is perhaps more unified than ever it has ever been before, except for the problem of Donald Trump.

So if Donald Trump lays off, eases off the gas pedal here and performs something resembling a coordinating role, or at least a non, not an active threat to the unity of NATO, NATO is going to persevere in the same way it's done through all of the various crises it's encountered over the last 75 years. Do you think it's possible if he doesn't back off that something else would have to be formed in his place? Like what happens if he doesn't back up? Well, you know, let's play the hypothetical game here for a second. Let's say Donald Trump says, I'm going to get the United States out of NATO. I am going to give notice to the United States of America, which is what the Washington Treaty says, is the only way you have to get out. The only thing you need to do to get out. You know, if he does that on a Friday, you know, everybody's going to still go to work.

on Monday morning. Like NATO is still going to exist on the Monday morning. Now, it'll exist without the credible military capabilities that the United States brings to bear. And the perhaps psychological dimension of the alliance won't be as strong. But NATO is still going to exist, just not in the way we have recognized for the last 75 years. Aaron, thank you very much for this. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much. All right. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poscent. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.