Why the U.S. staying in NATO is worse for Europe than them leaving
So, if we are just a few electoral twists away from a fascist hegemony where will ‘defence’ come from?
Let me be clear where I stand on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, (NATO). It is not, as it claims, a purely defensive alliance. The singular reason why it isn’t is because of the US which has always been imperialist and continues to be. It continues to be imperialist to such an extent that its currently threatening to invade a NATO ally. An alliance without the US, and remember in December 2024Trump suggested he’d leave NATO, might be a defensive alliance but with it it will never be. Ireland should not be in NATO for that reason.
And yet it is much more complex than that. The nightmare scenario, we’re told, is the US pulling out—leaving Europe exposed, NATO defunct, Putin emboldened. But look closer. Look at what’s actually happening.
Trump isn’t leaving as he threatened. Instead something much more strategic, and dangerous, is happening. He’s occupying! He’s paralysing the alliance from within, doing damage that withdrawal could never achieve. And whether he knows it or not—whether it’s a conscious strategy or convergent chaos—by wrecking NATO from within Trump is doing Putin’s work.
Why?
A US that left NATO would force Europe to grow up. Painfully, yes. Expensively, certainly. But necessarily. The question ‘who defends Europe? would finally have to be answered by Europeans, for Europeans. Thirty years of floating along on American military spending would end. The EU would have to build what it should have built in the 1990s: a genuine defence capacity. And true defence without imperialist motive? Only a fool would object to that.
Instead, we get this: a US president who signals he might not defend allies, that he might actually invade them, who constantly fetes Putin, who threatens tariffs (that plan just took a big hit from the US Supreme Court), who demands loyalty tests—while technically remaining inside the tent. The result for Europe is paralysis. European leaders can’t plan because they don’t know if the American umbrella still exists. They can’t build alternative structures because that would be “disloyal” to an alliance the US still nominally leads but has to all intents and purposes surrendered to Putin.
It’s the worst of both worlds. Europe to the US currently has all of the dependency, none of the reliability.
Ask yourself: what does Putin actually want regarding NATO?
A US withdrawal would be a propaganda victory, certainly. But it would also clarify the situation. Europe would have to act. And a united, armed Europe—even without America—is a formidable prospect and in time would be forced to become more so.
It’s much better for Russia, surely, to have the US inside the NATO tent pissing all over it. To have an American president who not only sows doubt but constantly insults allies, abuses them, delays decisions, demoralises everyone in Europe that he meets is a gift to Putin. To let NATO atrophy from within while maintaining the fiction of its existence is perfect for Putin. That way, Europe stays dependent but directionless, unwilling to build its own capacity because it’s still waiting for a saviour who is now its traitor.
That’s where we are. And that’s why the left’s analysis of the current war in Ukraine has been so catastrophically wrong.
Make no mistake, there’s a strand of the left—including in Ireland, including in Sinn Féin (or at least those within it making the decisions)—that cannot see Russia clearly as an imperialist aggressor because they’re still looking at it through Soviet spectacles. They behave as if 1991 didn’t happen and they still imagine Putin as an anti-imperialist bulwark against American hegemony, and Ukraine as a kind of wayward Soviet province whose “recovery” is legitimate.
Think about the emotional logic. If you’re ideologically wedded to the Soviet Union—if you believe it was legitimate, that it shouldn’t have fallen, that its disintegration was a crime—then Ukraine isn’t a country that Russia invaded. It’s a lost territory that it’s entitled to reclaim. Taking it back isn’t imperialism. It’s recovery.
Ask an Irish republican: are you an imperialist for wanting the six counties back? Most of us would laugh. The imperialists, in our frame, are the ones who drew the border, who maintain partition, who stole what was rightfully ours. Britain.
But there are some among us who actually see novichok Putin in those terms. Isn’t he only taking back what that western shill Gorbachev surrendered?
But the former (and it is very much former) Soviet Union wasn’t Ireland. It wasn’t colonised—it was the coloniser. What they consider the ‘recovery’ of Ukraine means the subjugation of Ukrainians. But that distinction only holds if you’ve already accepted that the Soviet project was itself imperial. And for many, unbelievably, that’s too much to accept.
So here’s what those Soviet spectacles blind them to. They blind them to the people underneath the boots. To the victims underneath the rapists. To the citizens of Mariupol and the dismembered of Bucha. Because this matters: when Russian soldiers get the chance in Ukraine, they do what their grandfathers did across Eastern Europe. The Soviet army’s predilection for rape in 1945—an estimated two million German women, and Polish, Russian and Ukrainian women too, raped by their “liberators”—isn’t mere history. It’s a throughline. UN reports from 2026 document Russian soldiers equipped with Viagra as a military tactic. Electric shocks to genitals. Gang rapes as terror. This is not an army of liberators. This is an army that still treats women as carnal booty.
Anyone that refuses to see this—that still reaches for Soviet-era spectacles—isn’t just wrong. They’re complicit.
So where are we now? Well we have had a decade of massive change and the advent of authoritarianism from Moscow to Washington to Tel Aviv. Fascism is now a daily realty on our news wires and our screens, And France, Germany and Britain could, in a short time, complete the picture. NATO has been rendered redundant by Trump – himself a fascist and much much more – as a defence against fascism and it only exists now as a block to the defence of Europe.
Putin’s oligarchy has waged a war somewhere for 23 of his 26 years in control in Moscow. That record suggests that he will not stop until he is stopped yet his control over Trump is de facto control of NATO. It’s time, past time, that if Europe truly wants peace and democracy, however imperfect, it found a means of defending it that didn’t rely on the treachery of Uncle Sam.
What that means for Ireland? Well next time…