Trump

Zachary B. Wolf, CNN  Trump’s ultimate goal, writes CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen, has long been to pull the US out of NATO, which was formed in 1949 to contain the threat of the Soviet Union and the spread of communism and is now organized around deterring Russian President Vladimir Putin. CNN’s Jim Sciutto, in a forthcoming book, quotes a former official in both the Trump and Biden administrations who predicts a Trump election win in November would mean “the US will be out of NATO.” Sciutto also writes about how Trump nearly pulled the US from the alliance during a 2018 NATO meeting.  At the same time, Trump tried to claim credit, arguing it is his tough talk and not the threat of Russian invasion that has caused NATO member countries to increase their defense budgets in recent years.

If Trump wins the 2024 election and does turn on NATO, he would run into that new language from Congress, which says the president “shall not suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty” without either a supermajority vote in the Senate or an act passed by the full Congress. When I asked the former US Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker about what Trump could do to undermine NATO as president, he first pointed out that Trump was boasting about his interaction with an unnamed world leader rather than promising future action. The Constitution, Volker noted, says the Senate must be involved with ratifying treaties but it is silent on the subject of withdrawing from a treaty. Any court battle could take years.

 

Rather than attempting to withdraw from NATO, a second Trump presidency could allow his allies to pursue a policy of making NATO “dormant,” an idea pushed by at least one Trump-allied think tank. Nobody knows exactly what that would look like, Volker said, but the president has immense power over how the US interacts with its allies.