President Donald Trump came to Ireland in September bearing gifts and affection for his hosts.
At the Irish Open trophy ceremony at his Doonbeg golf resort, Trump pledged to lift the 10 percent tariff on Irish whiskey. A day earlier, standing beside Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin in Dublin, he declared that U.S.-Irish relations had never been better.
Asked about Irish unification, he vouched for people on both sides of the border: “They’re Irish people. How can they be bad, right?”
Such warmth is not always on display for friendly nations—and especially not formal NATO allies.
At the July summit in Ankara, Trump branded Spain a “terrible partner” and told his Treasury secretary to cut off trade with Madrid, which has balked at NATO’s new 5 percent spending target.
Even in Dublin, he complained that Canada had ripped off the U.S. for 50 years.
Yet Ireland’s goods-trade surplus with America, the kind of imbalance his tariffs are meant to erase, earned a compliment: “You can be very proud of your country because it’s a big surplus.”
So why does Ireland get a pass? Spain and Canada at least belong to the NATO alliance and contribute. Spain even hosts two major U.S. bases. Insufficient it may be in the eyes of Trump’s Washington, but they’re at least partly paying their way.
Ireland isn’t a member, and last year it spent about 0.2 percent of GDP on defense, the lowest in the European Union, where the average is 2.2 percent.
Irish neutrality is a luxury underwritten by geography and the protection of others, and with Washington pulling back and an increasingly belligerent Russia pushing forward, it is harder to justify by the month.
Luke Coffey, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told Newsweek that “perceptions of Irish free-riding” are increasingly discussed in Washington and other European capitals.
Trump should give Dublin the treatment he gives allies: pressure to join NATO or, at minimum, to pay for the security it consumes.
The Kremlin Threat
Russia’s belligerence is getting worse. By late September, an Associated Press tracker of suspected Russian hybrid attacks in Europe had passed 200 incidents, up from 59 in March 2025. Danish military intelligence expects Moscow to escalate, as does Poland.
When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky landed in Dublin last December, drones came within 500 meters of an Irish naval vessel that had no air-search radar or jamming equipment.
Its officers held fire, citing rules of engagement and civilian aircraft overhead. Martin told parliament the circumstances suggested a Russian-inspired hybrid campaign.
Irish waters should—and do—matter to Americans, too. Roughly three-quarters of the Northern Hemisphere’s subsea cables pass near or through them, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Yet Dublin ordered military air-surveillance radar only in September. Full capability isn’t expected until the end of 2028. Ireland also has no fighter jets. Intercepting Russian bombers off its west coast falls to Britain’s Royal Air Force, under an arrangement dating to 1952.
Neutrality has also bred a convenient flexibility about Russia. In March, an Irish Times investigation traced alumina from Aughinish, a Russian-owned refinery on the Shannon estuary, to Siberian smelters selling aluminum to a Moscow trader.
Their customers included the maker of Russia’s Iskander missiles and dozens of other EU-sanctioned defense contractors. Russia took 43 percent of the plant’s alumina exports last year, revised official figures show, and almost 49 percent in the first half of 2026.
After Washington sanctioned the refinery’s owner, Rusal, in 2018, Irish diplomats lobbied for relief. Trump’s first-term Treasury delisted the company in January 2019 once the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s control was cut.
None of this proves Irish alumina ends up in Russian weapons. A government review in July found insufficient evidence that it does but could not rule it out. The plant is now expected to file periodic audits from a Swiss inspector it hired.
EU sanctions don’t bar alumina exports to Russia, and the company denies any military use. Still, treating such a plant chiefly as an economic asset is a luxury Russia’s neighbors cannot afford.
‘Inevitable’ But Slow
As Coffey said, Washington has noticed, even if the president hasn’t.
“We live in an increasingly difficult and complex geopolitical environment, especially within the transatlantic community,” Coffey said. “A country like Ireland, which has so much potential to contribute, can only remain on the sidelines for so long.”
The Irish potential lies in its Atlantic geography, transatlantic cables, and data centers, decades of U.N. peacekeeping, and flush public finances.
The biggest structural force keeping neutrality in place is sheer popularity. In a September Irish Times/Ipsos B&A poll, 68 percent backed keeping Ireland’s current model. Just 24 percent wanted change.
Karen Devine, a Dublin City University political scientist, argues that support has lasted five decades because it rests on national identity and resistance to great-power pressure. By that logic, browbeating from a president whose visit drew thousands of protesters would only harden it.
Nor is Ireland idle. A NATO partner since 1999, it serves in the alliance’s Kosovo force and lets U.S. military aircraft land at Shannon. Spending is rising, too, to a record €1.6 billion (about $1.8 billion) next year.
Even Coffey expects no quick change: Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine pushed Sweden and Finland into NATO but barely moved Ireland’s debate, he said. Still, he sees Ireland, in the long-run, abandoning neutrality as an “inevitable” part of deepening European integration.
The constraints mostly concern tactics and timing, not whether neutrality still works. Partnership is not membership. It brings NATO training and intelligence without any duty to defend an ally.
Popularity doesn’t make a policy free, it means someone else is paying. Measured against national income, which multinational profits distort less than GDP, spending was still just 0.3 percent last year.
And Trump holds leverage no European capital has: The U.S. is Ireland’s largest source of foreign investment.
Trump has promised to return next September for the Ryder Cup at Adare Manor, in the same county as Aughinish. In that contest, Irish golfers don’t play as neutrals. They play for Europe. Trump should ask Ireland to do the same off the course.