What will happen to NATO if Trump wins the November presidential election? And what might happen to Ukraine? The short answer, as modelled in a recent wargame designed by former a Whitehall strategist, is that Ukraine gets defeated while NATO survives as sideshow, paralysed by conflicting strategies among its major European players.
In this edition of Conflict & Democracy I’m going to explore the implications for the next government arising from the wargame, whose results were published in writeup at the PAXSims blog.
The exercise was organised by Finley Grimble, who worked for five years at the MOD, Cabinet Office and FCDO, specialising in “NATO defence and foreign policy, Russia-Ukraine strategy, China-Taiwan policy, the US-UK security relationship, and wargames for the four-star National Security Council Officials”. So this is about as close as we are going to get to the kind of scenario planning that might be going on for real.
The results are eye opening, especially if we consider a whole new Parliament and Cabinet may have to deal with these challenges as early as June/July.
Trump wins, what next?
The premise of the wargame is that Trump wins the election and, though he cannot take the USA out of NATO, he eviscerates its strategic combat power by, among other things:
Limiting NATO access to US intelligence,
Ending US participation in the NATO Nuclear Planning Group,
Reducing the powers of SACEUR; and
Pulling 50% of US troops out of Europe over four years.
In his first months in office, Trump tries and fails to broker an immediate Russia-Ukraine peace deal and the subsequent turns unfold as follows:
April-June 2025:
The Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) engages with Poland and adopts a forward defence strategy to deter Russia.
July-April 2026:
Turkey puts its involvement with NATO on life support;
Britain and France split over how to respond, with the EU powers now focused on European defence (with the private goal of subsuming NATO into the EU by 2035), and the Brits trying to hold together NATO as the prime agency to defend Europe;
The Ukraine war remains stalemated;
Trump maintains bilateral support for those NATO allies spending above 2% of GDP on defence (i.e. the frontline states).
At this critical juncture, Russia gives active consideration to invading the Baltics through the Suwałki Gap, but is deterred by the strength of the Polish-Finnish counter-offensive capability, and of remaining NATO maritime assets…
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