US President Donald Trump has again questioned whether NATO allies will be “there” if the US “needs” them, insisting that allied forces were “some distance away” from the front lines in Afghanistan.
“I’ve always said, ‘If we need them, will they be there?’ And that’s just the ultimate test. We don’t know. We know we would have been there, or we would have been there, but will they be there?” President Trump said Thursday in an interview with Fox News in Davos, Switzerland.
In response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States became the first, and so far only, member of NATO to invoke Article 5, which states that an attack on a member state is an attack on all members. For two decades, NATO allies and other partners have fought alongside U.S. forces in Afghanistan, but President Trump has routinely downplayed their sacrifices.
“We’ve never needed them. We’ve never asked them anything. You know, they’ll say they’ve sent troops to Afghanistan and all that. And they did. They were a little further away from the front lines,” he said.
The president’s comments irritate US allies in NATO at the end of a week in which he repeatedly threatened to seize control of Greenland, an autonomous region of Denmark, also a NATO member, causing serious tension in the alliance.
In absolute terms, the United States lost the most troops of any NATO country in Afghanistan, but some European countries with much smaller populations lost about the same number of troops in relative terms.
Approximately 3,500 Allied soldiers died in the conflict, 2,456 of whom were American and 457 British. Denmark, which had a population of about 5 million people when the invasion began, lost more than 40 troops.
Since the beginning of this year, President Trump has repeatedly questioned NATO’s support for the United States. “I don’t think NATO will be there for us if we really need it,” he lashed out on Truth Social on January 7. “We will always be there for NATO, even if NATO is not there for us.”
Before President Trump’s comments on Fox News, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte had pushed back against the president’s previous attempts to reduce the alliance’s willingness to support the United States.
“I heard what you said yesterday and today: You were absolutely not confident that if the United States were attacked, the Europeans would come to our aid,” Rutte said Wednesday, sitting next to Trump in Davos. “I’m telling you, they will. And you know, they did that in Afghanistan.”
“For every two Americans who paid the ultimate price, there was one soldier from another NATO country who never returned to his family,” Rutte said. “This is important. It pains me to think otherwise.”
British lawmakers across the political spectrum were also outraged by President Trump’s comments.
Defense Secretary John Healey said: “NATO Article 5 has only been triggered once. Britain and our NATO allies responded to America’s call, and more than 450 British soldiers lost their lives in Afghanistan.” “Those British soldiers should be remembered as they are, as heroes who gave their lives for our country.”
Emily Thornberry, chair of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, said Trump’s comments were “an utter insult”, while opposition Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch called them “utter nonsense” and said the sacrifices made by allies “deserve respect, not condemnation”.
Other members of the Trump administration have also downplayed the sacrifices made by NATO allies in Afghanistan. In June, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said his fellow U.S. troops in Afghanistan joke that the ISAF acronym on their epaulets (which stands for International Security Assistance Force) actually stands for “I saw Americans fighting.”
“In the end there were a lot of flags raised… but not a lot of capability on the ground,” Hegseth said, disparaging the efforts of NATO allies.
