Moreover, Trump has continued to mock his closest European allies, including British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, often warning them of imposing sweeping trade tariffs on their respective countries if they stall his moves to make Greenland a US territory.
Notably, NATO is a tightly-knit defence alliance, wherein an attack on a member state is bound to trigger Article 5 of its founding treaty, meaning every nation part of the bloc will have to provide military assistance if an ally's territory is under an attack.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte revealed on Monday how hollow European "strategic autonomy" really is, saying Europe cannot defend itself without US military support.
"If anyone here thinks that the European Union or Europe as a whole can defend itself without the US, keep on dreaming. You can't," Rutte told EU parliamentarians in Brussels. "Europe and the United States need each other."
"Trump's Greenland rhetoric and broader NATO pressure could be seen as coercive bargaining and strategic repositioning, not alliance abandonment. By targeting Denmark, Trump could be reinforcing America's primacy in the NATO alliance to negate any kind of claims of strategic autonomy by European countries," Sharma told Sputnik India.
If at all, Washington pulled out of NATO, the European security architecture without the US could be replaced by a fragmented security system, the strategic affairs pundit noted. Instead of collective defence, national priorities would be more pronounced, he asserted.
"In the absence of an American nuclear umbrella, countries like Germany and Poland would debate the question of acquiring nuclear weapons. Besides, the UK and France cannot realistically fill the void left by the American exit. They cannot defend the whole of Europe, as the US can," Sharma stressed.
Explaining his stance, the military analyst told Sputnik India that nothing about it in the American National Security Strategy (NSS) or National Defense Strategy (NDS) indicates so.
But there are greater demands being placed by the US on Europe to shoulder the burden, he highlighted. The Non-US NATO framing vis-à-vis Russia is very interesting, Bisen underscored.
For Europe, its discourse of rules-based order, global economy, geopolitical scenarios, etc., has been divorced from reality, the expert said. That is why there is cynicism with Trump's attempts at resetting the world order, and Europe is not prepared, he observed.
"It's not that Europe doesn't have the resources or technology; the moot point is that Europe, like Japan, got used to the American security umbrella and prioritised social security. The talk of an EU-led NATO has long been there since Trump 1.0," Bisen concluded.