Trump hugs a US flag at a rally in October.
One of the United States' most important defense alliances may be unraveled or reoriented by President-elect Donald Trump after he takes office, based on a review of his campaign statements, in a shake-up that would affect the country's longtime role as a global police officer.
It's a position that aligns closely with that of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose spokesman said on Thursday that Putin and Trump "set out the same main foreign policy principles, and that is incredible."
"It is phenomenal how close they are to one another when it comes to their conceptual approach to foreign policy," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in comments broadcast by Russian state TV's Channel One.
"And that is probably a good basis for our moderate optimism that they will at least be able to start a dialogue to start to clear out the Augean stables in our bilateral relations," he said.
Peskov's comments came after reports emerged Thursday morning that the Trump campaign had been in contact with the Kremlin before the election.
Trump has questioned the value of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization along the campaign trail. He has postulated that the US should not be obligated to come to the defense of its NATO allies if they "aren't paying their bills."
Notably, President Barack Obama has also criticized some NATO members in the past for not paying their fair share, and many foreign policy experts have argued that member countries should be pressured by the US to contribute more to the organization's operating costs.
An Abrams main battle tank for US troops deployed in the Baltics as part of NATO's Operation Atlantic Resolve.
But none has gone as far as to suggest, as Trump has, that the US disengage from the alliance completely because some of its members are not living up to various financial obligations.
As many experts say, the value of being allied with strategically positioned nations around the world — and being perceived as a global leader — far outweighs the financial losses that the US might incur from picking up some of the slack.
"Sooner or later, the mess created by a disengaged US will become a threat to the US itself, and the US will have to clean it up eventually to a much larger cost," Magnus Petersson, the head of the Centre for Transatlantic Studies at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, told NBC earlier this year.
Ian Bremmer, president of the political risk firm Eurasia Group, wrote in an article published Wednesday that a disengaged America and weakened NATO would lead to a strengthened Asian bloc capable of providing an alternative to "lower-tier allies" looking for protection.
Between May and July of this year, the Russians heightened their military posture throughout Europe and spurred talk of a renewed intervention in Ukraine.
The country stopped short of provoking an armed NATO response, but it warned Europe that it could find itself in Russia's "crosshairs" if NATO didn't back down from plans to conduct war games in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
US Army soldiers guard as Air Force F-22 Raptor fighters are parked in the military air base in Siauliai, Lithuania.
"The newer members of NATO — and especially the Baltics — have reason to be very concerned," Stephen Biddle, an adjunct senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and professor of political science at George Washington University, told Business Insider on Wednesday.
"They're not rich enough or big enough to defend themselves against the Russians, and a Trump administration's willingness to help them is very unclear," he said.
It's more unclear given Trump's stated admiration for Putin, as well as his apparent desire to work more closely with Russia to fight terrorism once he takes office.
From threats about pulling out of NATO to altering the GOP's policy on Ukraine— which has long called for arming Ukrainian soldiers against pro-Russian rebels — Trump's rhetoric has consistently aligned with a narrative that continues to overwhelm the collective Russian psyche: namely, that the US is overly meddlesome and "globalist."
US-Russia relations are now at their lowest point since the end of the Cold War, largely because of two major Russian interventions, in Crimea and in Syria, since 2014.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg congratulated Trump on his election victory in a statement on Wednesday. But he reminded the president-elect of the "solemn" and "unconditioned" commitment all NATO members have to the organization.
"NATO's security guarantee is a treaty commitment," said Stoltenberg, who cautioned over the summer that NATO's security depends on US security, and vice versa.
"All allies have made a solemn commitment to defend each other," he said. 'This is something absolutely unconditioned."