President Donald Trump is threatening to leave NATO, calling the alliance of nations “a paper tiger” in a recent interview with The Telegraph.
The announcement from the president comes after his long, troubled history with NATO, which has intensified recently after NATO refused to join the U.S. and Israel in their war against Iran. However, several NATO nations did agree to “contribute” to efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has closed to most shipping traffic. Trump said that the idea of removing the U.S. from the alliance is now “beyond reconsideration.”
“I was never swayed by NATO,” Trump told The Telegraph. “I always knew they were a paper tiger, and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin knows that too, by the way.”
Trump also blamed NATO for not providing “automatic” support for efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
“We’ve been there automatically, including Ukraine. Ukraine wasn’t our problem. It was a test, and we were there for them, and we would always have been there for them. They weren’t there for us,” Trump said.
Hours prior to the Trump interview, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the U.S. would need to “reexamine” its relationship to NATO following the end of the war in Iran. Rubio posited that the alliance had become “a one-way street.”
“When we need the help of our Allies, they’re going to deny us basing rights and they’re going to deny us overflight,” Rubio said on Fox News.
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In response, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the U.K. was “fully committed” to the alliance. “NATO is the single most effective military alliance the world has ever seen,” he told reporters on Wednesday, calling the war with Iran “not our war.”
French deputy defense minister Alice Rufo said Wednesday that NATO should not conduct military operations in the Strait of Hormuz because it “would not respect international law” and is outside of “the Euro-Atlantic area.”
Michael Hanna, U.S. program director at International Crisis Group, told Salon that Trump’s threats have cast serious doubt on the alliance’s collective defense clause.
“Trump’s attitude and comments have certainly undermined Article 5 and created doubt about Trump’s commitment to the treaty itself,” Hanna said, noting that Trump’s past clashes with NATO have produced little results. “Trump has lost interest or shifted to other issues,” Hanna said.
Jennifer Kavanagh, director of Military Analysis at Defense Priorities, said that Trump is effectively prevented from leaving NATO. “Trump cannot pull out of NATO and continue fighting the war in Iran,” she said in an email to Salon. Kavanagh pointed out that Trump “needs bases in Europe to fight it.”
“If he announces he’s leaving NATO now, he loses that,” she explained. “This is a constraint on how far he can go with respect to moving away from NATO allies for now.”
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