NATO Is the Most Successful Military Alliance in History. So, Why Don’t Its Citizens Trust It?

Politics | May 2026

Here is a number worth sitting with for a moment.

In 2025, NATO member states spent over $1.4 trillion on defense. European allies and Canada alone contributed $574 billion — a 20% increase in real terms from the previous year. For the first time in the alliance’s history, every single one of its 32 member states met or exceeded the 2% of GDP spending target that had been on the books since 2014 but largely ignored for a decade. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte called it a historic milestone. He wasn’t wrong.

And yet, across those same member states — the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy — something else is happening. Food bank usage is rising. Housing is unaffordable for a generation of young workers. Healthcare systems are crumbling under demand. Wages have barely kept pace with the cost of living. The far right is surging in every major democracy in the alliance. Reform UK, the AfD, the Rassemblement National — they are not protest votes anymore. They are governing parties, near-governing parties, or parties with polling numbers that have the political establishment terrified.

The question is not whether NATO is successful. It clearly is. The question is: successful for whom?

The Alliance That Won Everything

Let’s be fair to NATO first, because the record deserves acknowledgment before the critique.

The alliance was founded in 1949 in response to Soviet expansionism. It held the line for forty years without a single Article 5 conflict being triggered. It oversaw the peaceful end of the Cold War. It expanded from 12 members to 32, incorporating the very countries that once sat behind the Iron Curtain — Poland, the Baltic states, the Czech Republic, Hungary. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it was NATO’s cohesion — its weapons, its intelligence sharing, its political solidarity — that made Western support for Kyiv possible.

By every conventional measure, this is the most successful military alliance in the history of the world. It kept the peace between nuclear-armed superpowers for eighty years. That is not a small thing.

But military alliances are not judged only by generals. They are ultimately judged by the people asked to fund them, and if necessary, to die for them. And by that measure, something has gone very wrong.

$1.4 Trillion and Counting – But Counting Toward What?

At the 2025 NATO Summit in The Hague, member states agreed to raise defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. Not 2%, which most of them struggled to hit for years. Five percent.

To understand what that means in practice, consider that the Netherlands — a wealthy, stable Northern European democracy — unveiled its 2026 budget with a series of austerity measures to contain rising debt, while simultaneously committing billions more to defence. The Dutch government isn’t unusual. It’s typical. Across the alliance, the choice being made in finance ministries is stark: military budgets up, everything else under pressure.

The New Economics Foundation put it plainly: if governments can find the political will to raise defence spending to 5% of GDP, they cannot in the same breath say there is no money to fix care systems, housing crises, or climate infrastructure. The money exists. The choice is about where it goes. And right now, it is going to weapons.

None of this means the spending is unjustified. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was real. The threat to the Baltic states is real. The geopolitical environment of 2026 is genuinely more dangerous than it was in 2010. But the citizens being asked to absorb these costs are also the citizens who cannot afford rent, who wait months for a GP appointment, who watched their children’s schools deteriorate for a decade. The ask — be patient while we rearm — lands very differently depending on where you’re standing.

“Those trade-offs — I’m going to give you false precision around this — but those trade-offs happen towards the end of the decade into the next decade and we will be much, much better informed.” Mark Carney (Canada PM, NATO Summit, June 2025)

The Social Contract That Got Left Behind

Here is what the past decade looked like for ordinary citizens in NATO countries.

In the UK, the National Health Service has been in a state of managed crisis for years. Waiting lists hit record highs. Accident and emergency departments routinely operate beyond capacity. The “triple lock” pension formula — raising state pensions by the highest of inflation, wage growth, or 2.5% — already costs £15.5 billion annually, triple its original forecast, and by the end of the decade healthcare and disability costs are projected to reach £100 billion. The government is committed to reaching 2.5% of GDP on defence in the near term and 3% by the end of the decade. There is no equivalent commitment to the health service.

In Germany, Bosch announced 13,000 job cuts. The Gesamtmetall industry association warned that rising social contributions were unsustainable. Economists describe the fiscal burden as “pure poison for the economy.” An ageing population drives pension and healthcare costs upward while tax revenues from a shrinking workforce fail to keep pace. And Germany, which spent decades deliberately keeping its defence budget low as a post-war statement of intent, is now rearming at the fastest pace since the Cold War.

In France, social spending already exceeds a third of the national budget — yet any attempt to reform it triggers mass protests. The country runs Europe’s most expensive welfare system and still has some of its most frustrated citizens.

A 2025 survey by Eurofound found that 57% of European respondents were now at risk of depression. Headline inflation had stabilised. The economy, on paper, was recovering. And more than half the continent was mentally struggling. That is not a coincidence. That is the signal of a society where the material conditions of everyday life — housing security, healthcare access, job stability, the feeling that the future will be better than the present — have deteriorated beneath the surface of the macro numbers.

The Anger Has an Address

People who feel unprotected by their own governments do not typically respond by trusting institutions more. They respond by trusting them less.

That is what is happening across the NATO alliance, and the irony is almost too sharp to bear. An institution whose entire purpose is protection has become, in the minds of millions of its citizens, a symbol of a political class that protects the wrong things. It protects borders. It protects trade routes. It protects the territorial integrity of nations. It does not protect you from being priced out of your city, from losing your job to automation, from waiting eighteen months for a mental health referral.

The question is no longer whether populism will reach Berlin, London, and Paris. It is what would happen to European institutions if it does. Reform UK is polling in territory that makes a future government plausible. Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National has a genuine path to the French presidency — an outcome that would give the far right executive power over the EU’s only nuclear state and permanent UN Security Council member. The AfD broke a psychological barrier by winning an outright majority in a German state election earlier this year.

These parties did not emerge from nowhere. They emerged from the specific feeling — felt most acutely by working-class and lower-middle-class voters — that the institutions of liberal democracy are managed for someone else’s benefit. NATO, as the most visible and expensive of those institutions, absorbs a share of that feeling whether it deserves to or not.

The Legitimacy Problem Nobody Wants to Name

There is a version of this argument that says NATO simply needs better communications. That if people understood what the alliance actually does — the deterrence, the intelligence sharing, the collective response — they would support the spending.

That version is wrong.

The problem is not that people don’t understand NATO. The problem is that they understand it perfectly. They understand that it is an alliance of governments. And they have looked at what those governments have done with the money, the power, and the mandate they were given — and they have concluded that the deal is not fair.

Military security and human security are not the same thing. You can live in a country that has never been invaded and still feel profoundly unsafe. Unsafe in your finances. Unsafe in your health. Unsafe in your children’s futures. NATO was designed to address one kind of insecurity. It has no answer for the other. And the political class that asks citizens to fund ever-larger defence budgets while telling them there is no money for public services is making a category error — confusing the defence of a nation with the defence of its people.

If governments can consider raising defence spending to 5% of GDP, they cannot in the same breath say there is no money to strengthen care and fix the housing crisis. That sentence — from the New Economics Foundation — is the most concise summary of the legitimacy problem available.

What Would Actually Fix It?

The answer is not to defund NATO. That would be catastrophic, especially given the security environment of 2026.

The answer is to be honest with citizens about the trade-offs and to make them fairly. If defence spending must rise — and there is a reasonable case that it must — then the burden should fall on those with the most capacity to bear it, not on public services that working-class families depend on. Joint EU-level borrowing for defence, as several economists have proposed, would spread the fiscal pain across the bloc rather than concentrating it in domestic social budgets. Raising defence spending through debt is not ideal — but it is significantly less damaging than raising it through cuts to healthcare, housing, and education.

More fundamentally, the political class needs to stop pretending that military security is the only kind of security that matters. The far right is not winning votes by promising to leave NATO. It is winning votes by promising to prioritise the people who have been left behind by thirty years of decisions made in their name, for other people’s benefit.

NATO’s legitimacy crisis is not a communications problem. It is a delivery problem. The alliance keeps its promises to governments. It needs its governments to start keeping their promises to people.

The Bottom Line

NATO is, by any objective measure, an extraordinary achievement. It kept the peace in Europe for eighty years. It is still functioning, still expanding, still spending at historic levels. The generals are satisfied.

But satisfaction at the top of an institution and trust from the bottom of a society are two completely different things. And right now, across Britain, France, Germany, and a dozen other alliance members, the trust is running out.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said the security of one billion people is at stake. He’s right. But security means something different to a nurse in Manchester, a factory worker in the Ruhr, or a young couple in Lyon who cannot afford to buy a home, than it does to the people writing defence budget allocations in Brussels.

Until NATO’s member governments start treating human security as seriously as military security, the alliance will keep winning the strategic argument and losing the political one. And an alliance that cannot hold its own citizens is, eventually, an alliance that cannot hold anything.

Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for educational and informational purposes only. The views expressed represent analysis of publicly available information and do not constitute political advice.