NATO Must Sell Itself to Americans

Alliances are like potato chips. The key to success is convincing new customers they need the product while reminding existing customers why they should keep buying.

By that standard, NATO doesn’t appear to be doing badly. Two-thirds of Americans want to maintain or increase America’s role in the alliance, according to a February Gallup poll. This parallels another survey, by Pew Research, which found 58% have a favorable view of NATO.

But is this bag of potato chips half-full or half-empty? Gallup also found that 28% of Americans either want to reduce support for NATO or withdraw entirely. Pew concluded that 38% have an unfavorable view of NATO.

In other words, just two years after Russia invaded Ukraine, and 75 years after NATO was founded, one-third of the American public wants to end the country’s most important and most successful security relationship.

The numbers point to other ominous trends. In the face of an aggressive Russia and steadily growing Chinese power, one might expect Americans to value alliances more than ever, yet the Pew result of 58% was down four percentage points from a year earlier, according to the research center.

And support for NATO is now sharply ideological: 75% of Democrats favor NATO, while Republican support dropped to 43% from 49% in 2023.

NATO’s own polling found that only 66% of citizens in member nations would vote to stay in the alliance. Not surprisingly, given France’s desire for a purely European defense bloc (led by France), fewer French than Americans want to stay in NATO.

France left NATO from 1966 until 2009 and the alliance endured. Whether NATO could survive the withdrawal of the US, its largest member, is another matter.

To some extent, NATO does have an ironclad contract with America. In 2023, after Donald Trump threatened to withdraw from the alliance, Congress passed a law that bars the US from leaving without Senate approval.

However, any law that Congress makes can be unmade later, and it makes little difference how the majority of Americans feel about NATO. The blessing and curse of the US political system is that it enables a minority of voters — notably rural, conservative voters — to wield disproportionate influence.

The 30 or so members of the Republican Freedom Caucus are just a fraction of the 435-strong House of Representatives. They don’t speak for most Americans, and they ultimately failed to convince their own party not to pass a vital aid bill for Ukraine. Nonetheless, they were able to block passage its passage for four months, even as Ukraine’s army had to ration artillery shells.

This means that, after decades of broad bipartisan agreement, European security has become a partisan issue. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where even if the US doesn’t formally leave NATO, its meaningful participation is held hostage by a faction that uses it as leverage to obtain concessions on other issues in Congress.

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This doesn’t even include what could happen if a President opposes the alliance. A recent wargame concluded that Trump, who has spoken repeatedly against NATO, could hamstring the alliance without leaving. He could just minimize American participation to a point where the US might as well withdraw.

Most of the blame for this situation is justifiably labeled “made in America.” But if NATO isn’t resonating with one-third of the American public, then the alliance bears some responsibility as well and needs to think the issue through.

The problem isn’t a lack of effort to cement transatlantic ties. There has been no shortage of conferences and think tank reports — even a NATO youth summit — to discuss European security. But these events tend to deal with a narrow demographic: politicians, government officials, academics, and bright young students at elite schools.

These constituencies are not the ones that vote for Trump, or European populists like Marie Le Pen. The votes of farmers, factory workers, and construction workers count no less than those of university professors and diplomats. And whether NATO likes it or not, these groups seem to be becoming more skeptical about the alliance.

Trying to change their minds by calling them ignorant is foolish in itself. As any successful business knows, you don’t prosper by insulting your customers. Especially when those customers have a legitimate grievance: almost half of NATO states still don’t meet the alliance’s goal of spending 2% of their GDP on defense, while the US is spending around 3%.

Nor will appealing to grand notions of international security work any better. To some experts, the advantages of US membership are self-evident: close ties with some of the most prosperous nations on Earth, and the comfort of having any war with Russia fought on European rather than American soil.

But to ordinary Americans — which is most Americans — the advantages of being involved in the affairs of a continent thousands of miles away are not always so obvious.

NATO is going to have to find some other way to market itself. And potato chips provide a good example.

The appeal of snack foods is often nostalgic: a familiar taste from childhood. Even 80 years after World War II, there is an enduring nostalgia for the Second World War, which Americans remember as the last “good war.”

In many ways, NATO is the successor to the Western Allied coalition that defeated fascism. The alliance can remind Americans that the “Greatest Generation” fought and died to save the world against tyrants like Hitler (Europe is covered in US military cemeteries) and that stopping Putin is a continuation of that struggle. The distance between D-Day in 1944 and the war in Ukraine in 2024 is not so great.

Encouraging Americans to believe they are saving Europe will rankle with some Europeans but the key to NATO winning over the American public may be to appeal to hearts rather than heads.

Michael Peck is a defense commentator. He can be found on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.