Fewer than half of Americans now believe their NATO allies would actually show up if the United States came under attack. Not that they think NATO is a bad idea, or that the alliance should be dissolved. Just that when the moment of reckoning arrived, the call would go unanswered.
That finding, buried in polling data released just weeks before NATO leaders gathered for their annual summit in Ankara, Turkey, is the kind of number that deserves more attention than it usually gets. It isn’t a story about whether Americans like NATO. Most of them do. It’s a story about something more fundamental: whether they trust it.
Approving of an institution and trusting that it will actually function when needed are two different things. You can support the idea of collective defense and simultaneously doubt that collective defense would materialize when it was most needed. That gap, between endorsing NATO on paper and believing it would hold in practice, is where American public opinion sits in 2026.
The Number That Changes the Story
Fewer than half of Americans, 47 percent, say they are very or somewhat confident that if the United States was attacked, European allies would come to the nation’s defense, down from 62 percent in 2025. That’s a 15-point drop in a single year, a substantial shift for a question that had been relatively stable across decades of polling.
The decline in confidence has fallen across all partisan groups, and especially among Democrats, who are down 24 percentage points, with no more than half now expecting Europeans to come to America’s aid.
The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, which conducted the June 2026 polling in partnership with Ipsos, reports that agreement on NATO’s importance still runs across party lines, though Republicans are more inclined to support unilateral action over allied operations when military force becomes necessary. Two-thirds of Americans, 68 percent, say the United States should either increase or maintain its current commitment to NATO, a figure that has remained broadly consistent with readings going back to 2002.
What Republicans and Democrats Actually Think
The partisan picture on NATO is messy in ways that resist easy summary. Both parties have moved, but in different directions and at different speeds, and neither direction is quite what you’d expect from the loudest voices in the debate.
A Pew Research Center survey conducted in late March 2026 found that Republicans have become considerably less likely to say the United States benefits from being a member of NATO. Around four in ten Republicans and GOP-leaning independents, 38 percent, say the U.S. benefits a great deal or a fair amount from NATO membership, down from 49 percent the year before. A majority of Republicans, 60 percent, now say the U.S. benefits not too much or not at all from the alliance, up from 50 percent in 2025. Pew notes this marks the first time in their surveys that a majority of Republicans have expressed that view.
The same survey finds that most Americans, 63 percent, are not confident that Trump can make good decisions when it comes to working effectively with NATO. That loss of confidence in presidential stewardship of the alliance cuts across the general favorability numbers. You can think NATO is valuable and also worry that the current approach to managing it is eroding rather than strengthening it.
The Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, which fielded its own nationally representative survey of 1,330 U.S. citizens from February to March 2026, found that a majority of U.S. adults, 61 percent, say U.S. membership in NATO is at least moderately important, and just over half, 52 percent, say U.S. security benefits at least a moderate amount from membership. The survey also revealed a deep divide within the Republican Party itself: fewer than 1 in 4, just 22 percent, of those who identify primarily as Trump supporters say NATO provides at least a moderate benefit to U.S. security, while nearly half, 47 percent, of those who identify more broadly with the Republican Party do.
Article 5 and the Credibility Problem
Article 5, the core foundation of the nearly 80-year-old NATO alliance, holds that if any member nation becomes the victim of an armed attack, the other members will consider it an attack against all and “take the actions it deems necessary” to assist. According to Harvard’s Belfer Center, the clause has only been invoked once in the alliance’s history. On September 12, 2001, the North Atlantic Council unanimously adopted a conditional resolution stating that if the attacks were determined to have originated from abroad, they would be regarded as an action covered by Article 5. On October 2, 2001, after U.S. officials briefed the Council on the results of the investigation, that determination was confirmed and the invocation became fully operative.
The invocation of Article 5 after 9/11 is often cited as evidence that collective defense works. European allies did deploy troops and did suffer significant casualties in Afghanistan over two decades. America’s NATO allies cumulatively lost well over 1,000 troops in combat over a 20-year period in the wars that followed. That history isn’t nothing. But the current political environment has made historical precedent feel less predictive than it once did.
The Trump administration has repeatedly questioned whether the United States should be bound by the alliance’s mutual defense commitments if member states haven’t met spending benchmarks. Trump’s position has consistently been framed around burden-sharing, responding to questions about whether the U.S. would defend NATO partners who, in his view, were not paying a fair share toward their own defense. His public formulation, “if you’re not going to pay, we’re not going to defend,” has been stated explicitly.
When the leader of the alliance’s most powerful member raises public doubts about the conditionality of collective defense, it changes what ordinary Americans take the alliance to actually guarantee.
The Spending Argument and Europe’s Response
In 2025, NATO’s European member states and Canada collectively increased defense spending by 20 percent in real terms, reaching a combined total of $574 billion, the largest single-year increase in the alliance’s history. For the first time since committing in 2014 to spending at least 2 percent of GDP on defense, all 32 NATO allies are meeting that threshold. Germany broke its constitutional debt-brake rule to invest $114 billion in defense, and Poland is on track to spend 5 percent of GDP.
That spending surge is real, and it represents a substantial shift. But it has not visibly translated into renewed confidence among ordinary Americans that European allies would act in a moment of crisis. The gap between institutional commitment and public perception remains wide. Spending pledges, however large, exist in the realm of policy documents. Public trust is built from different raw material.
Polling across 15 European NATO countries shows that Europeans feel similarly uncertain about the relationship, with majorities saying they do not believe the United States would defend them if their country came under attack. The skepticism runs in both directions. Europeans doubt America’s commitment; Americans doubt Europe’s.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has fixated on burden sharing in the NATO alliance, maintaining focus on eliminating what his administration characterizes as “free riding,” even as his threats to annex Greenland, his decision to join Israel in launching a war against Iran without prior consultation with allies, and his musings about making Canada the 51st state have shaken the alliance’s foundations. Partisan attitudes toward U.S. security commitments have shifted dramatically over the past decade, and NATO sits at the center of that realignment in ways that show no sign of reversing.
Where the Numbers Get Complicated
Read the polling data carefully enough and a more complicated picture emerges. The story isn’t simply that Americans are abandoning NATO. Two-thirds of Americans say the United States should either increase or maintain its commitment to NATO, with 25 percent favoring an increase and 43 percent favoring maintaining the current commitment. That is a durable number, consistent with decades of polling, and it holds across partisan lines in a way that many foreign policy questions no longer do.
A December 2025 national defense survey found that 68 percent of Americans hold a favorable view of NATO, the highest percentage recorded since that survey began in 2018, and 76 percent said they would support the U.S. military coming to the defense of a NATO ally under Article 5’s collective defense clause.
What those numbers reveal, set against the low confidence in Article 5 reciprocity, is an asymmetry worth examining. Americans are broadly willing to honor the alliance’s commitments. They are far less certain their allies would do the same. That gap reflects something real about how the past several years have changed the way people think about the transatlantic relationship. In public discourse, the alliance has been defined primarily by what the United States gives rather than what it receives. Whether that description is accurate, or whether it’s a product of sustained political messaging, is a separate question. But it has settled into the public’s picture of how the relationship works.
What This Actually Means
The most important thing about these numbers isn’t the specific percentages. Polling fluctuates. A 47 percent confidence rating in June 2026 could be 55 percent by next spring, depending on what happens in Ankara, or in Kyiv, or in whatever next flashpoint reshapes the terms of the conversation.
What produced the shift is the more consequential question. Public confidence in NATO military assistance has not dropped because Americans did a careful audit of the alliance’s capabilities. It dropped because the rhetorical environment around collective defense has made reciprocity feel conditional in a way it didn’t before. When a president states publicly that the U.S. may not honor its treaty obligations unless allies meet a spending threshold, that formulation doesn’t stay in the policy world. It becomes part of how people understand what the alliance is, what it promises, and who it’s really for.
There’s a harder version of this problem, too. The whole point of collective defense is deterrence: an adversary calculates the odds before acting. When the average across NATO member nations finds 57 percent confidence that Article 5 would hold, while only 43 percent of Americans agree, that number doesn’t just describe a domestic polling story. It travels. Some of these doubts go back further than the current administration, built up through decades of burden-sharing grievances and recurring questions about whether European allies were genuinely committed. Naming that history doesn’t resolve anything, but it’s usually where the real conversation starts.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.