One month into Operation Epic Fury against the Islamic Republic of Iran, a long-overdue conversation has finally broken into the open: What, exactly, is the enduring rationale for NATO? For decades, this question has been treated in Washington foreign policy circles as heretical. But it isn't. And to their credit, President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are now saying so plainly.
As Trump recently put it, "They haven't been friends when we needed them. We've never asked them for much. ... It's a one-way street." Rubio has been similarly blunt: "If NATO is just about us defending Europe if they're attacked but then denying us basing rights when we need them, that's not a very good arrangement. ... So all that's going to have to be reexamined."
They're spot-on.
At best, America's European "allies" have spent decades free-riding on the U.S. security umbrella. Despite repeated commitments to meet baseline defense spending targets, many NATO members still under-invest in their militaries and outsource their national defense to American taxpayers. The imbalance is staggering: The United States accounts for the overwhelming majority of NATO's military capabilities, logistics and strategic lift. Overall, American taxpayers contribute about 60 percent of total spending on NATO defense.
At worst, some of these same European allies actively undermine U.S. operations at critical moments. Major Western European countries, such as Spain and France have restricted or complicated the U.S. use of their airspace during Operation Epic Fury. That is farcical. A so-called alliance in which members obstruct one another's ability to wage war is not actually an alliance — it is a liability.
This raises the core question: Why, exactly, does NATO exist in the year 2026?
Let's recall its origins. NATO was founded in 1949 with a clear and urgent mission: to contain and, if necessary, defeat the Soviet Union. That mission was compelling — indeed, existential. Western Europe lay devastated after World War II, and the Soviet threat was real, immediate and hegemonic.
But that world quite literally no longer exists.
The Soviet Union collapsed three and a half decades ago. The Berlin Wall fell the year I was born. The Cold War is now a relic of history. By any reasonable metric, NATO achieved its raison d'etre by the early 1990s. But instead of declaring victory and recalibrating, the alliance drifted. It expanded ever further into Eastern Europe and shifted its ostensible mission into ... well, something.
Simply put, NATO is today an organization in search of a purpose.
Is NATO a collective defense pact against the geopolitical successor to the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation? If so, why do so many European NATO members fail to take that threat seriously enough to invest in their own national defense? Is NATO now instead a vehicle for global counterterrorism? If so, why have its members sat on the sidelines and refused to join the United States as it goes to battle against the world's No. 1 state sponsor of jihad? Or is NATO nowadays just a political club for liberal democracies? If so, what does that have to do with a hardheaded conception of the U.S. national interest?
NATO has become a catch-all institution, long on triumphalist platitudes but short on the strategic realities on which its existence was predicated.
Meanwhile, the global order is shifting. The initial post-Cold War era of enthusiastic multilateralism has slowly given way to a more interest-driven, nationalist paradigm. Nation-states are rediscovering the primacy of sovereignty, borders and self-interest. In such a world, the idea that the United States should blindly remain bound to a 20th-century transnational alliance structure is untenable.
This certainly does not mean that America should retreat into isolationism. But it does mean that our alliances must be rethought, recalibrated and — where necessary — replaced.
The geopolitical future lies not in outmoded multilateral boondoggles but in agile, strategic bilateral and trilateral partnerships. These smaller, more focused arrangements allow for clearer expectations, greater accountability and more direct alignment of national interests. They avoid the bureaucratic inertia and free-riding that plague massive superstructures like NATO.
The highly effective binational U.S.-Israel assault on Iran over the past month illustrates what a dynamic 21st-century bilateral alliance can do. The contrast with the sclerotic NATO member states of Western Europe is stark.
For too long, American policymakers have treated NATO as an article of faith. But alliances are not sacred. They must be consistently reevaluated to determine whether they still serve their intended purpose and advance our national interest.
If NATO cannot meet that test — if it continues to function as a lopsided arrangement in which the United States pays, protects and sacrifices while others equivocate and obstruct — then it is not only reasonable but necessary to question its future and America's role in that future.
Operation Epic Fury has exposed these contradictions in stark relief. Something clearly must change. The ball is in NATO's court. Because the status quo is no longer defensible — and deep down, everyone knows it.