“Trump 2.0” Is Reshaping NATO Defense Sharing: Characteristics, Motivations and Impacts by Sun Chenghao and Li Jialin
The transformation of NATO defense burden-sharing mechanism from "collective security" to "security deals" is reshaping transatlantic defense and widening US–Europe divides.
Welcome to the 55th edition of our weekly newsletter! I’m SUN Chenghao, a fellow with the Center for International Security and Strategy (CISS) at Tsinghua University, Council Member of The Chinese Association of American Studies, a visiting scholar at Paul Tsai China Center of Yale Law School in 2024 and a Munich Young Leader 2025.
ChinAffairsplus is a newsletter that shares articles by Chinese academics on topics such as China’s foreign policy, China-U.S. relations, China-Europe relations, and more. This newsletter was co-founded by my research assistant, ZHANG Xueyu, and me.
Through carefully selected Chinese academic articles, we aim to provide you with key insights into the issues that China’s academic and strategic communities are focused on. We will highlight why each article matters and the most important takeaways. Questions and feedback can be addressed to sch0625@gmail.com
Today, we have selected an article written by Sun Chenghao and Li Jialin on “Trump 2.0” Is Reshaping NATO Defense Sharing: Characteristics, Motivations and Impacts.
Summary
The NATO defense burden-sharing mechanism is undergoing a profound transformation from “collective security” to “security deals”. The eastward shift of the United States’ global strategic focus, the change in its perception of the relationship between alliance and hegemony, the constraints of its domestic resources, and the institutionalization of Trump’s transactional diplomatic approach have accelerated this process. The Trump administration intends to reshape the NATO defense burden-sharing mechanism. By pushing allies to increase military spending, raising the threshold for meeting defense standards, strengthening bilateral arrangements, and undermining the liberal value foundation of the alliance, it aims to weaken original patterns of cooperation and the foundations for political identity within NATO, triggering a crisis in the legitimacy and operational efficiency of the alliance system.
This transformation has led to a systematic reconfiguration of the division of responsibility transatlantic security: Europe is increadingly pushing for “strategic autonomy”, causing the strategic resources of the alliance to be tilted towards “frontier” countries. Meanwhile, the differences between the US and Europe have intensified the resistance for NATO in advancing its “Indo-Pacific Strategy”, widened the transatlantic structural rift, and pushed Europe to seek a strategic rebalancing to enhance policy flexibility on the issue of China.
Why It Matters
This article examines NATO’s transformation of its defense burden-sharing mechanism from “collective security” to “security transactions,” highlighting its significant implications for understanding the current international security environment and trends in global governance. It not only reveals the potential structural changes in the transatlantic security order under Trump 2.0, but also provides an in-depth analysis of Europe’s limited capacity and its inherent dilemmas in pursuing autonomy in defense. Building on this, the article advances feasible approaches for China in responding to NATO’s “Indo-Pacific shift.”
More importantly, it links the prospects of China–Europe cooperation with functional differentiation within NATO, thereby addressing Europe’s internal demand to balance relations with China and to uphold multilateralism. At the same time, it offers a practice-oriented perspective for China to expand its strategic space and soften the “over-securitization” narrative in a complex international landscape. Overall, the analysis contributes valuable insights to understanding transatlantic rifts, the trajectory of European strategic autonomy, and potential opportunities for China–Europe cooperation.
Key Points
The New Features of NATO’s Burden-Sharing Mechanism under U.S. Leadership
The transactional foreign policy of Trump’s first presidency disrupted NATO’s long-standing model of security cooperation based on collective security, breaking the alliance’s established pattern of cooperation. As a result, NATO’s burden-sharing mechanism has taken on a series of new characteristics.
Principle Transformation: from “Collective Security” to “Security Transactions”
The Trump administration fundamentally called into question successive U.S. presidents’ interpretation of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which was framed as a pledge to defend Europe against Soviet or Russian aggression. It explicitly demanded that NATO allies pay the price for the protection provided by the United States. A rhetorical position in his first term, in his second presidency Trump translated this stance into practice, stressing that U.S. support would depend on allies’ financial contributions. This effectively downgraded the “defense of Europe” from a core U.S. interest to an optional matter subject to cost–benefit reassessment.
Standard Simplification: from the “3C” Framework to Spending Thresholds
In the past, NATO relied on the “3C” framework—Cash, Capabilities, Contributions—as a key reference for evaluating members’ defense efforts, which helped prevent states with lower military expenditures from being marginalized. However, during his first term, Trump adopted a “maximum pressure” strategy toward Europe, reducing financial input to the sole benchmark of legitimacy within NATO. He accused most members of “exploiting the United States” for failing to meet the 2 percent defense spending target, and in his second term, on January 7, 2025, he further raised the requirement to 5 percent. At the Hague Summit in 2025, NATO members largely accepted this demand, effectively redefining NATO as a security community oriented around military capability, underscoring that the space for complementarity and strategic coordination is giving way to the singular logic of defense spending thresholds.
Pathway Bilateralization: from Collective Consultation to Bilateral Mechanisms
The U.S.-driven trend toward bilateral burden-sharing pathways is reshaping NATO’s internal distribution of responsibilities from an institutional perspective, potentially leading transatlantic relations to drift toward a bilateral-dominant model. NATO’s collective security obligations were traditionally grounded in the North Atlantic Council’s principle of consensus-based decision-making, under which major decisions required approval by all members. Yet during both Trump presidencies, the U.S. repeatedly bypassed formal consultation procedures in contexts such as the Afghanistan war and the Russia–Ukraine conflict, undertaking unilateral actions that severely undermined NATO’s multilateral decision-making. In parallel, the Trump administration has accelerated bilateral defense arrangements, even relying on personal ties to deepen bilateral binding with countries such as Poland, Finland, and Hungary. This dynamic may encourage front-line states highly dependent on U.S. protection to bypass NATO and seek security guarantees through bilateral relations with Washington, further eroding the multilateral foundation of NATO’s burden-sharing mechanism.
Value Disruption: from Liberalism to “America First”
NATO’s internal liberal values have traditionally framed institutional participation as part of a political community’s obligations. Trump, however, regarded this as an obstacle to advancing his “America First” agenda. This was evident in the first Trump administration’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from Germany, the second Trump administration’s criticism of Europe’s aid to Ukraine, and the conspicuous omission at the 2025 Hague Summit of any reaffirmation of “adherence to the purposes and principles of international law and the UN Charter, and commitment to maintaining a rules-based international order.” Together, these developments reflect the weakening of NATO’s liberal consensus, the gradual detachment from shared values, and the growing subordination of NATO’s agenda to U.S. preferences.
The Drivers of the U.S.-Led Paradigm Shift in NATO Burden-Sharing
The U.S. push to reshape NATO’s burden-sharing paradigm is both a pragmatic response to shifts in the international and regional strategic landscape and to the growing divergence between U.S. and European positions. At the same time, it is also the outcome of structural domestic fiscal pressures combined with the rise of anti-globalization currents.
Deepening U.S.–Europe Divergence amid America’s Strategic Indo-Pacific Reblance
The U.S. strategic shift toward Asia emerged in the post–Cold War era, was consolidated under the Obama administration, and further reinforced during Trump’s first term. In his second term, Trump sought to disengage from regional conflicts and concentrate strategic resources on the Indo-Pacific to contain China, which amplified divergences between the United States and Europe. First, the priorities of their Indo-Pacific strategies diverged: Washington focused on building an anti-China coalition, while Europe emphasized non-military cooperation and therefore approached the U.S. pivot with caution. Second, their threat perceptions differed: the U.S. highlighted China as a key threat, whereas Europe remained primarily concerned with Russia, a gap widened by the Ukraine crisis. Third, the continuous U.S. shift eastward redefined its role in Europe from direct participant to balancer, maintaining Europe’s dependence on Washington as a cost-efficient way of managing Eurasia. Europe has increasingly been marginalized as a “high-dependence, low-contribution” region.
Erosion of U.S. Trust in the Alliance System
For decades, the United States regarded alliances as a key pillar of its hegemony, sustaining order by offering security, market access, and political support to allies, with NATO serving as the cornerstone of this structure. Yet the arrangement carried a persistent structural tension: the excessive costs borne by the hegemon versus the “free-riding” of subordinate states. As global power balances shifted and U.S. strategic resources became constrained, Trump pursued “peace through strength” while reducing reliance on the alliance system, reframing it from a hegemonic pillar into a functional tool. The Ukraine crisis not only revealed the erosion of the U.S.-led liberal order but also escalated the costs of alliance maintenance, intensifying Washington’s distrust of allies and directly accelerating the paradigm shift in NATO burden-sharing.
Mounting Domestic Economic and Political Pressures
Over the past decade, the U.S. trend toward strategic retrenchment has been shaped by both structural pressures from global transformation and regional conflicts, and by domestic challenges including persistent fiscal deficits, soaring debt, deepening social divisions, and rising anti-globalization sentiment. The 2008 financial crisis, pandemic stimulus spending, and the fiscal and security burdens of the Ukraine and Israel–Palestine crises all contributed to record levels of U.S. debt, sharpening cost–benefit scrutiny of external commitments. At the same time, the rise of populism and the mainstreaming of “America First” rhetoric entrenched Trumpism and sustained anti-globalization currents. As a result, the U.S. has deliberately reduced global conventional force deployments, reallocating strategic resources and relying more heavily on technological superiority and power projection to preserve influence. Within the NATO burden-sharing framework, this tendency has translated into shifting greater defense responsibilities onto European allies.
The Impact of Trump’s Personality on Policy Choices
Trump’s transactional mindset and strongman political style have further shaped U.S. approaches to NATO. He has treated security commitments as commodities with a clear price tag, criticized Europe’s long-standing free-riding, and demanded tangible returns. At the same time, his embrace of populist rhetoric and confrontational posturing reinforced an “America First” image, repeatedly challenging multilateral norms to redefine alliance relations and project himself as a leader breaking with old conventions. During his second term, the Ukraine crisis provided an opportunity to intensify pressure on European allies. At the 2025 NATO Summit, Trump advanced the new 5 percent defense spending target and coupled it with tariff threats, vividly illustrating his transactional logic and forceful style.
The Implications of the Reshaping of NATO’s Burden-Sharing Paradigm
The U.S. trend toward strategic retrenchment and responsibility-shifting represents not a superficial adjustment of fiscal contributions, but a fundamental strategic reorientation that disrupts the traditional model of U.S.–European functional cooperation. This shift is likely to trigger cascading changes in transatlantic relations across four key dimensions: strategic deployment, external agendas, institutional linkages, and China-related strategy.
Sharper Functional Differentiation within NATO
Driven by U.S. retrenchment and pressure from Trump, NATO has introduced a new division of labor characterized by “the U.S. steering, Europe carrying the load.” Specifically, Washington continues to retain strategic dominance, focusing on command and control, strategic deterrence, and high-end combat capabilities, while sustaining its leadership through limited troop deployments and technological superiority. Europe, in turn, has been compelled to accelerate defense adjustments and assume greater responsibility for regional security. The EU has launched the “Rearming Europe Plan” and the “European Security Action Plan,” channeling massive resources into defense spending with an emphasis on complementarity with the United States. The U.K. and France promoted nuclear coordination through the Northwood Declaration; Germany explored a “European nuclear umbrella”; and a U.K.–Germany partnership advanced long-range strike capabilities. Europe has also increased investments in advanced domains such as air defense, communications, drones, and cyber security, gradually strengthening strategic autonomy. Yet this trajectory has simultaneously fueled an arms race, heightened strategic uncertainty, and increased the risks of regional imbalance and miscalculation.
Weakened Momentum for NATO’s “Indo-Pacific Shift”
Since 2019, based on its framing of China as a “systemic challenge,” the U.S. has sought to expand NATO’s engagement in the Indo-Pacific, linking Eurasian and Indo-Pacific security through the Ukraine crisis, promoting institutionalized cooperation with Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, and emphasizing intelligence, cyber, defense, and joint exercises. European states, however, have adopted a far more cautious stance. With limited resources, they prioritize homeland defense and commitments to Ukraine while worrying that excessive entanglement in U.S.–China rivalry will shrink their room for maneuver in engaging with Beijing. Consequently, Europe’s Indo-Pacific approach has focused narrowly on freedom of navigation, supply chains, and climate governance. Trump’s transactional approach to defense has deepened European concerns, while the absence of Japanese, Korean, and Australian leaders from the 2025 NATO Summit underscored the lack of momentum for a collective Indo-Pacific shift. Should divergences persist, NATO’s credibility and stability in the Indo-Pacific will be undermined, highlighting instead the appeal of the EU’s support of multilateral, inclusive, and sustainable approaches to defense.
Widening Structural Rifts in Transatlantic Relations
The reconfiguration of NATO’s defense responsibilities under Trump 2.0 has further eroded Europe’s trust in institutionalized alliances, spurring a faster push for “strategic autonomy.” In terms of capacity building, the U.S. emphasis on “America First” and “fair burden-sharing” has forced Europe to confront the risks of a defense vacuum once U.S. security commitments recede. This has propelled the growth of mechanisms such as PESCO and the EDF, alongside expanded defense investment and technological integration—for example, the EU’s €910 million commitment in 2025 to enhance defense capabilities and the U.K.–France Industrial Accord aimed at loosening U.S. regulatory constraints. Yet these mechanisms face significant limitations in quality of cooperation, intra-member coordination, and technology absorption. Simultaneously, America’s drift from Europe’s liberal traditions toward transactional realism has undermined their ideological consensus. The Trump administration’s retreat from Europe’s security commitments has also shifted Europe’s perception of the U.S. from “reliable ally” to “potential adversary.” Under such conditions, rebuilding consensus around shared values and strategic objectives is becoming increasingly difficult, raising the risk of a widening transatlantic rift.
Europe’s Active Role in a NATO “Rebalancing” on China
Although the Ukraine crisis has brought European security back to NATO’s core agenda, NATO’s engagement on China has neither enhanced deterrence nor improved China–Europe relations. Instead, it has heightened Europe’s concern about becoming a U.S. tool for containing China. Under American pressure, Europe must sustain a degree of alignment within NATO’s framework, broadly accepting China as a “systemic rival” and “potential security challenge”—particularly in the context of China–Russia cooperation, critical technology security, and “de-risking.” Europe has also participated in shaping a “technological NATO” by accelerating transatlantic networks in frontier areas such as AI, quantum computing, and cyber security. At the same time, Europe has sought to rebalance NATO’s China approach to avoid full-scale bloc confrontation. This involves leveraging engagement with China as both a bargaining chip with the U.S. and a means of preserving its own strategic space, while emphasizing dialogue and cooperation with Beijing on issues such as multilateralism and diplomatic solutions to the Ukraine crisis. In the long run, Europe advocates building rational mechanisms of threat detection and coordination within NATO, maintaining necessary caution but also preserving opportunities for limited China–Europe cooperation on climate change, arms control, and public health. This approach aims to retain room for de-escalation and mutual trust within an environment of systemic competition.
Conclusion
The Trump 2.0 era is transforming NATO’s burden-sharing logic from an institutionalized community to an instrumental platform, structurally loosening the transatlantic security order. The 2025 NATO Summit at the Hague achieved limited consensus but revealed internal discord and constraints on external expansion. NATO is in a transitional phase of “U.S. retrenchment, European advance.” Europe is accelerating strategic autonomy but remains constrained in capabilities, fiscal support, and political unity: core military capacities still rely on the U.S., defense spending competes with welfare priorities, and Germany and France diverge on the scope of autonomy, challenging overall stability.
For China, NATO’s “Indo-Pacific pivot” may perturb the external security environment, yet internal limits moderate its impact. China can mitigate the “over-securitization” narrative through dialogue, leveraging U.S.–Europe differences, and deepening policy engagement. NATO’s functional differentiation creates opportunities for pragmatic China–Europe cooperation in green energy, digital infrastructure, and connectivity, aligned with EU priorities on supply chain resilience and low-carbon transition. Reconciling the Belt and Road Initiative with the EU’s “Global Gateway” can further promote cooperation decoupled from security concerns. In the long term, China–Europe engagement in political dialogue, economic complementarity, and multilateralism may become a key factor influencing NATO’s stance toward China, balancing deterrence and cooperation while preserving strategic flexibility.
About the Author
SUN Chenghao 孙成昊: Dr. SUN Chenghao is a fellow and head of the U.S.-Europe program at the Center for International Security and Strategy (CISS), Tsinghua University. He was a visiting scholar at Yale Law School in 2024. His research interests include U.S. domestic and foreign policy, China-U.S. relations, transatlantic relations, AI and International security, etc. He teaches a graduate-level course on Transatlantic Relations in Tsinghua University. Dr. Sun has co-authored dozens of reports and books. He is the Top 1% Highly Cited Scholar (2024) in China according to statistics of China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). Dr. Sun is also Council Member of the Chinese Association of American Studies.
Li Jialin 李佳霖：Li Jialin is a doctoral student at the Institute of International Relations, China Foreign Affairs University.
About the Publication
The Chinese version of the article is published by Peace and Development《和平与发展》 (CN: 11-3641/D) . Peace and Development is a large-scale bimonthly periodical approved by the National Press and Publication Administration, sponsored and supervised by the China Association for International Friendly Contact. It is publicly distributed and solicits contributions both domestically and internationally. The journal is indexed in CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure), CSSCI (Nanjing University’s Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index, including the extended edition), Wanfang Data, and VIP Database, and is archived by the National Library of China and the Shanghai Library. Peace and Development has long been committed to providing the latest and most authoritative academic research achievements across multiple disciplines, and it has gained wide attention and high recognition from the academic community and researchers.
