The debate over NATO’s future is as old as the alliance itself. As the United States moves to redraw its military commitments across Europe, Dr. Emad Gad breaks down what dissolution would mean for the EU, its member states, and the balance of power beyond Europe’s borders.
By Mirna Fahmy
On May 1, 2026, the U.S. Department of Defense formally announced plans to withdraw 5,000 service members from Germany. The following day, President Donald Trump criticised German Chancellor Friedrich Merz over remarks concerning the U.S. response to the Iran conflict, and stating intentions to cut troop numbers ‘a lot further’ than the initial 5,000.
The prominent Egyptian political analyst, researcher in international affairs, former member of Egypt’s House of Representatives, and an advisor at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo Dr. Emad Gad offers context for the move: “Trump considers the Americans the ones who rebuilt Germany and maintained the largest NATO bases there, over 36,000 troops on the front line against the Soviets, and facilitated the absorption of East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
Gad stresses that Germany is the number one economy in Europe, the largest GDP on the continent, and yet the German Chancellor made statements that provoked Trump. Trump felt Germany, of all countries, owed America an enormous debt of gratitude and was not paying it. “So he started with Germany as a message to all Europeans.”
Besides Germany, Spain and Italy have received the same warnings. Trump has stated he will ‘probably’ pull troops from Italy, explicitly criticizing the country for not being “any help to us” during the ongoing conflict with Iran. Italy currently hosts approximately 13,000 U.S. personnel.
Trump has similarly threatened to withdraw forces from Spain that hosts about 3,800 U.S. personnel, labeling their lack of support for the war on Iran as ‘horrible’. There are speculations that the U.S. may draw down its presence at the Rota or Morón air bases.
Gad adds France to the list because America liberated France from the Nazi occupation, and France’s President Emmanuel Macron acted as if he was the head of the European Union (EU) and challenged Trump.
Since Trump’s second term, some U.S. troops already left Romania in October 2025. More recently, the U.S. confirmed a further reduction of 1,500 to 3,000 troops on NATO’s eastern borders, which includes a drawdown at the Mihail Kogălniceanu Air Base in Romania.
This isn’t the first time for Trump to announce that he would withdraw troops from NATO. In his previous term, in June 2020, he had ordered a major drawdown of 12,000 troops. But that directive was rejected by the Congress and later halted by Biden’s administration in 2021.
During Biden’s time which is described by Gad ‘weak’, the Europeans wanted Ukraine to enter NATO and extract from him as much military assistance as possible. That is why Ukraine held firm against Russia as it was sustained entirely by American aid provoking Russia into war. Gad sees that the Europeans exploited the Americans, and that is what drove Trump absolutely mad.
The Americans understood perfectly well that absorbing Ukraine would cause the Russian bear to explode regardless of the consequences. They knew that was the one true red line. On the other side, the Europeans were ‘reckless’ in supporting Ukraine because the eastern part of Ukraine had autonomy and its own Russian language, and then began being suppressed and persecuted, Gad explains. “Russia couldn’t sit still watching that, inciting it to wade in.”
After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the U.S. President John Biden increased U.S. troop deployments to Europe to reinforce NATO’s eastern flank and deter Russian aggression from spreading beyond Ukraine. By establishing a visible presence near the conflict zone including permanent bases in Poland and augmented forces in the Baltic states, Germany, and Romania, the U.S. aimed to send a clear message to Moscow that any attack on NATO territory would be met with overwhelming collective force.
Many analysts now suggest that Europe is entering a period of maximum danger and is inching closer to a potential war with Russia as the window for NATO to effectively deter aggression rapidly closes.
Russia is expected to escalate hybrid warfare tactics. This strategy involves using non-kinetic methods such as cyberattacks, disinformation, and sabotage to destabilise European societies and test the cohesion of NATO without immediately triggering a full-scale military response.
European intelligence agencies have already documented an unprecedented rise in these coordinated operations across the continent. Recent incidents include arson attacks on logistics hubs, a strike at an arms factory in Romania, and transitions in cyber operations from intelligence gathering to active disruption of energy grids and water treatment plants. Furthermore, persistent Russian GPS jamming in the Baltic region has become a primary zone for electronic warfare, regularly disrupting hundreds of civilian flights and maritime navigation.
These moves may involve probing NATO’s Article 5 collective defense commitment through localized incursions or grey-zone activities, calculated on the assumption that the alliance might hesitate to risk broader escalation over limited territorial gains.
The scene has become more vulnerable with the withdrawal of the US troops and the clear sign of NATO dismantlement. Poland, a front-line NATO member, could find itself forced to reconsider its position and move toward accommodation with Moscow if American forces withdraw. Even if the European Union attempted to revive the Western European Union as an independent security coercion, Gad cautions that it would still be unable to stand on its own because Russian ground forces could advance across the continent within days.
NATO officials, including Secretary General Mark Rutte and German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, have warned that Europe must prepare for the possibility of war within the next few years.
Germany is rapidly modernizing its military (the Bundeswehr), a process Pistorius calls on the ‘right track.’
According to SIPRI, Germany raised its 2026 defense budget by 24% to approximately $114 billion. This marks the first time since 1990 that Germany has exceeded NATO’s 2% GDP spending benchmark, with plans to reach 3.5% by 2029.
To expand its forces, Germany aims to grow its active-duty troops from 185,000 to roughly 260,000 by the mid-2030s. Combined with a planned reserve force of 200,000, the total military structure will reach about 460,000 personnel.
Additionally, a new military service framework began on January 1, 2026. All 18-year-old men and women must now complete a fitness and willingness questionnaire. While service remains voluntary, this framework creates the administrative foundation to rapidly reintroduce mandatory conscription if necessary.
While Europe is working to bolster its ‘European Shield’ and increase munitions production, Russia is simultaneously rebuilding its forces at a rapid pace. In that case if Europe cannot significantly enhance its military readiness by 2030, the power imbalance may become too great to deter Russian opportunistic aggression.
Gad, however, offers a more measured reading of Putin’s intentions. He does not predict a full-scale war between Europe and Russia, and pushes back on the notion that Putin harbors ambitions of Soviet-style expansion. Poland, he notes, presents a fundamentally different case from Ukraine because there is no territorial dispute, and 92% of its population is Catholic unlike Ukraine, where its population is majority Eastern Orthodox like Russia.
“Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has already annexed Crimea,” Gad notes. “My assessment is that if he takes the eastern part of Ukraine whose population speaks Russian and is loyal to him, he will be satisfied with that. He does not have ambitions to annex entire countries or rebuild a Soviet-style bloc, given that Russia’s economy isn’t strong, and Putin as president won’t continue forever. He wants to leave Russia without wars.”
Putin’s recent visit to China, in Gad’s view, reflects a broader awareness that the international order is shifting. The unipolar moment that followed the Soviet collapse is ending, and Russia under Putin understands that the future lies in multipolarity not confrontation. It is within that context, Gad believes, that Putin’s ambitions are ultimately bound to securing what he considers historically and demographically Russian territory, and no further.
NATO’s Future
The debate over the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)’s relevance is not new. As far back as 1951, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the alliance’s first Supreme Allied Commander, wrote that if American troops had not returned home within ten years, the whole project would have failed. He saw the U.S. presence as a temporary bridge, not a permanent arrangement.
That tension resurfaced in 1966 when French President Charles de Gaulle pulled France out of NATO’s integrated military command structure, and again after the Soviet collapse in 1991, when many argued the alliance had simply outlived its purpose.
Gad explains why it survived. “NATO was formed in 1949, and the Warsaw Pact in 1955,” he notes. “The Warsaw Pact collapsed without a war, and NATO continued for two reasons. First, it’s an institution with a headquarters, members, staff, and a budget, and institutions fight to preserve themselves. Second, the U.S. found in NATO an opportunity to transform Eastern and Central European countries into the Western system, using their fear of Russia as leverage.”
The membership conditions made that agenda explicit: a capitalist economy, civilian control over the military, free markets, democracy, and human rights. “NATO was essentially converting these countries from socialist systems to capitalist ones,” Gad states. “To enter NATO, they had to transform. The conditions are closer to those for joining the EU.”
This institutional endurance became the focus of Gad’s 1998 doctoral thesis, which examined how shifts in the international system affect alliances. Using NATO as a case study, he predicted the alliance would eventually break apart due to changes in geopolitical realities.
“When one of two opposing alliances collapses, the other tends to disintegrate as well,” Gad says. “I predicted the problem would come from burden-sharing, the gap in defense spending between Western Europe and the U.S. Washington’s position was that these countries are wealthy now, and America cannot keep funding their security while they invest in their own technology.”
According to Gad, two forces were historically pushing NATO toward decline. The first was the perceived disappearance of a direct threat; without the Soviet Union, member states initially felt secure and grew increasingly reluctant to bear military costs or follow American leadership. The second was mission completion, as NATO had largely finished integrating Eastern and Central Europe. The final, unresolved piece of that map was Ukraine.
These internal fractures began exposing themselves openly during the 2003 Iraq war, when France and Germany broke with Washington, revealing a fractured, two-tiered alliance. Before Trump, successive U.S. presidents from George W. Bush to Barack Obama pushed allies toward the 2% GDP defense threshold with little success.
What is new is Washington’s recent approach. Rather than pressing allies as a bloc, the U.S. has shown a willingness to deal with European countries individually. Gad sees this bilateral strategy as a unique threat to continental unity. “America could facilitate the EU’s fragmentation by offering advantages to some countries and withholding them from others,” he argues, “creating conflicts of interest between an independent-minded Western Europe and a more Washington-reliant Eastern Europe.”
If this strategy leads to the dismantlement of the alliance, Gad warns the fallout will not be contained. “A complete American withdrawal is one scenario; a partial reduction is another,” he says. “If America withdraws completely, the conflicts of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s might return to European soil.”
Without the alliance structure holding them in check, frozen rivalries such as: Alsace-Lorraine, Greek-Turkish tensions, and dormant nationalist movements, could re-emerge as well. Further afield, Türkiye could move more aggressively toward building a Sunni axis with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, a realignment that would obstruct Saudi-Israeli normalization. Whether Türkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan could deliver on that vision is another question because Gad elaborates that Türkiye is now politically divided and Erdoğan faces significant domestic pressures.