Trump may pull the United States out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization

The president of the United States is openly considering dismantling the 77-year-old military alliance that has been the cornerstone of American foreign policy since the Second World War, and he appears to believe he can do it by himself, without so much as a by-your-leave from the Congress that holds the purse strings and the constitutional power to declare war.

It is a remarkable state of affairs. The commander in chief, a man who once called NATO a “paper tiger” and who has spent years complaining that European allies are freeloaders, recently said he is “absolutely” considering an attempt to withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

President Donald Trump told a British newspaper that the question of U.S. membership is “beyond reconsideration.” He has singled out the United Kingdom, of all nations, for particular scorn, telling its prime minister, in so many words, that Britain no longer has a navy worth the name and that its aircraft carriers do not work.

The proximate cause of this latest eruption is the war with Iran.

When NATO allies declined to send warships to the Strait of Hormuz and refused the use of their airfields for American strikes, Trump took it as a personal betrayal.

He called his request for assistance a “test,” and he has concluded that the allies have failed it.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who as a senator co-authored a law expressly designed to prevent this very outcome, now sounds as though he has forgotten his own handiwork.

NATO serves the interests of the U.S. by extending American influence, securing strategic allies, and sharing the burdens of global defense—ultimately multiplying our military power and ensuring that Washington does not have to face its adversaries alone.

“We are going to have to reexamine whether or not this alliance that has served this country well for a while is still serving that purpose,” Rubio told Fox News, “or is it now become a one-way street?”

The law in question, passed in 2023 and signed by President Joe Biden, is explicit. It states that the president “shall not suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty, done at Washington, DC, April 4, 1949, except by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, provided that two-thirds of the Senators present concur, or pursuant to an Act of Congress.”

That is about as plain as the English language gets, but Trump has shown little respect for laws that constrain him. But the president has expressed a different view of the matter.

He has told reporters that he does not need Congress for that decision, that he can make it himself. And he may well be right — not in law, but in practice.

Congressman Tom Kean, Jr., who was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe in 2024, as the U.S. marked the 75th anniversary of the NATO alliance, reaffirmed the United States commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and to the Article 5 principle of Collective Defense.

Like most other Republicans, Kean has never stood up to Trump’s law-breaking.

The Constitution is silent on the question of treaty exit, and the Supreme Court has never squarely resolved it.

The only case to reach the high court on the subject, Goldwater v. Carter in 1979, was decided on procedural grounds and involved a bilateral treaty terminated in accordance with its own terms.

It is a thin reed on which to rest a claim of unilateral presidential power to undo a multilateral treaty of this magnitude, but it is the only reed the president needs if no one can stop him.

And who, exactly, would stop him? Experts who gathered at the Brookings Institution in July to game out a legal challenge to a unilateral withdrawal were not optimistic.

They identified a narrow window of opportunity — after the president deposits a notice of withdrawal under Article 13 of the NATO treaty, but before the one-year clock runs out — in which a lawsuit might be both ripe and not moot.

They identified a handful of potential plaintiffs: Americans employed directly by NATO, the state of Virginia through its contracts with NATO’s Allied Command Transformation, and defense contractors with agreements directly with the alliance. But they also noted that these plaintiffs have little appetite for litigation against the current administration.

Congress could authorize litigation on its own behalf, but that would require majority support in both chambers — a tall order in a divided government. Individual senators could sue, but the case law is unfavorable.

The House’s Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group could act, but its authority is untested. The whole enterprise, in short, is a lawyer’s fever dream: a constitutional confrontation that would take years to resolve, if it could be resolved at all, and that would leave the alliance in tatters in the meantime.

Even if a court were to rule against the president, the administration could simply hollow out the alliance from within — withholding key appointments, blocking exercises and refusing to participate in decisions — until NATO became a shell of its former self. One does not need to withdraw from a treaty to render it meaningless. One need only treat it with contempt.

This is the logic that has brought us to the present pass. The president has been consistent on this point for nearly 40 years.

In a 1987 New York Times advertisement, long before he entered politics, he insisted that “America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.”

He has never wavered from that view. During his first term, he threatened to withdraw from NATO and came close enough that his national security adviser, John Bolton, later said he had “his heart in his throat” at a 2018 summit, unsure whether the president would cross the line. Bolton has since said he believes Trump would have pulled the United States out of NATO if he had been reelected in 2020.

Now, in his second term, the administration has adopted “burden shifting” as a rallying cry. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has told European counterparts that the United States must focus on priorities other than Europe’s defense and that Europe itself must “take ownership of conventional security on the continent.”

The Pentagon has launched a Europe Posture Review that is expected to recommend deep cuts in U.S. troop levels. The administration has already canceled a planned deployment of long-range missiles to Germany and pulled troops from Romania.

The Europeans, for their part, have responded with a mixture of alarm and paralysis. Some still hold out hope that if they can wait out Trump’s second term, NATO will return to “normal.” Others fear that doing too much too fast will trigger the very withdrawals they are trying to forestall. The result is stasis — the opposite of what the administration says it wants and exactly what it needs to justify its next move.

The president’s critics, including some in his own party, have raised the alarm. Sen. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, told the Los Angeles Times that he is “most concerned” about a scenario in which unrest is provoked in major cities to “give the president a pretext, Reichstag fire-like, to call out the military or invoke the Insurrection Act.”

That is a reference to the arson attack that Hitler used to suspend civil liberties in Germany in 1933 — a comparison that would have seemed unthinkable a generation ago and that now passes for routine political commentary.

But even as they sound these alarms, the Democrats are preparing to do business with this administration after the election, should they regain control of the House.

The meeting between House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, is the latest evidence that the two parties share a fundamental class interest, whatever their rhetorical differences.

The Times reported that they discussed “potential areas of common ground” on housing, immigration and the cost of living — as if the future of the Western alliance were a matter of secondary importance.

The oligarchy has two parties. The working class must build its own.

The president has not yet deposited a notice of withdrawal. He may never do so. He may prefer to keep the allies guessing, to use the threat as leverage, to extract more defense spending from European governments that are already increasing their budgets at a rate that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

But the threat itself is doing damage. As one expert put it, the very idea of a U.S. exit erodes trust, cohesion and the credibility of collective defense. It weakens deterrence, shakes European security planning and emboldens adversaries.

The president said this week that Iran had asked for a cease-fire, though Iranian officials denied it. He said the deal would be considered when the Strait of Hormuz is “open, free, and clear.” Until then, he vowed, the United States will be “blasting Iran into oblivion.” It is a belligerent posture, and it is one that his NATO allies have declined to share. The president takes that as a betrayal. His allies take it as prudence.

In the end, the question may not be whether the United States formally withdraws from NATO, but whether the alliance can survive a president who treats it with open contempt.

The law may prohibit a unilateral exit, but the law cannot compel a president to lead. It cannot force him to treat allies as partners rather than dependents. It cannot make him believe that the security of Europe is the security of the United States. Those are matters of conviction, and on those matters, the president has been clear for nearly 40 years.

The treaty remains in force. The question is whether the commitment behind it remains in force as well. That is a question the lawyers cannot answer, and the courts cannot resolve. It is a question for the American people and for the Congress that represents them — if Congress can find the will to assert itself before it is too late.