Can have control or equality

If wanting to be in control, expect to pay for that privilege, otherwise expect to share that control.

The US came out of WWII much better off than a destroyed Europe, largely because of their late entry into it that enabled them to commercially exploit the defence needs of the UK during the war and the rebuilding of Europe afterwards through the Marshall Plan. The US wanted to control the world's agenda and being able to afford to pay for defense and rebuilding gave it that. However, every few years the US goes through a periodic internal political retraction from that role because it resents the role it created for itself with the consequent financial reliance upon it by many nations.

That is the price of having dominant control. In recent years the US has been pushing for NATO nations to pay their share of the defence budget. That the US has been the major funder of NATO is a result of their wanting to control the organisation and its agenda given its rivalry with the Soviet Union. The top military commanders of NATO have always been from the US, reflecting their ultimate dominance of it. To now wanting more funding from Europe, coupled with Trump coddling up to Putin, means that they cannot expect to retain control. No one wants to pay their share and not share control.

However, NATO relies heavily upon US military intelligence and control technology which Europe has not built up to be ready to takeover. It is that technology that gave the US the means of dominating NATO, and if it really wanted Europe to subsume more control, it should have pushed for them to work to replace it a decade before pushing for more financial input. Power and finances are either dominated or shared in tandem, but expecting one without the other is unrealistic, unless in a position to enforce such an imbalanced arrangement, which the US largely was in NATO's earlier years.

So NATO is still heavily tied to US control technology until Europe can develop replacements. However, Trump's wholesale upending of world trade is showing Europe that it needs to decouple itself from dependency upon the US as soon as possible, which is why their defence budgets have increased rapidly, and not because of a few years of US pressure to pay their supposed fair share. Of course, the US had hoped that the increased defense spending would be largely spent with the US military sector, but the trade disruption has also pushed Europe to decouple from that as well.

The US is in one of its contractive phases, though it still has difficulty letting go of the power to set the world's agenda. But with Trump's deliberate chaos in trade and defense, the world is seeing how unstable the US political system is. It always has been, but it had the money to spend to get every other nation to keep pretending is was not. It is not some beacon of democracy, because it was not designed to be by its founders and its constitution. This readjustment of attitudes towards the US has been needed, but it is disruptive, and will be for the next few decades.

A byproduct of trying to distance from US hegemony is that many may start to question what alliances the US has had them sign up to, such as the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, but some are also reappraising Putin and Russia as possibly having been unfairly demonised by the US. Be wary of the latter as Putin is not to be trusted at all, and most of Russia's situation is of Putin's making, regardless of what the US and others may have said about NATO expansion. Putin has the same design for the former Warsaw Pact countries as the USSR had, and their concerns must be considered as well.