Former US President Donald Trump has contemplated withdrawing from NATO or significantly reducing America’s commitment to the alliance if he wins the 2024 election, Rolling Stone magazine revealed on Monday.
Rolling Stone reported that Trump has expressed openness to leaving NATO entirely or remaining in the military alliance if its European members increase their defence spending and scrap Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which treats an attack on one member state as an attack on all 31.
Starting “World War III” over some of the EU’s weaker members makes no sense, Trump told his aides in mid-2018, claiming that most Americans had never heard of any of these countries. This anecdote, attributed to a “former senior administration official,” backs up what former National Security Advisor John Bolton told the Washington Post last year: Trump was ready to declare the US withdrawal from NATO at the bloc’s 2018 summit, but ultimately backed down on Bolton’s recommendation.
“In a second Trump term, I think he may well have withdrawn from NATO,” Bolton said at the time.
With conflict raging in Ukraine and NATO’s Eastern European and Baltic members urging the alliance to step up its military aid to Kiev, Trump has repeatedly warned of the likelihood of “World War III” breaking out in Europe. If elected, Trump has promised to cut off military aid to Ukraine and force its president, Vladimir Zelenzky, to negotiate a peace deal with Russia.
Trump blamed the crisis on “all the warmongers and ‘America Last’ globalists in the Deep State, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the national security industrial complex,” who he said were “obsessed with pushing Ukraine towards NATO.”
According to Rolling Stone, Trump has stated unequivocally that his second government will not be staffed by “NATO lovers.”
According to the sources, Trump examined a policy proposal by conservative writer Dr. Sumantra Maitra titled ‘Pivoting the US Away from Europe to a Dormant NATO’ earlier this year and liked some of its ideas. Maitra said in the report that “the NATO bureaucracy” is “prone to pushing missions that are beyond NATO’s core role and, at times, opposed to NATO’s core role.”
