U.S. alliances are more important than ever in an increasingly dangerous world, so it’s notable that Congress is taking out an insurance policy against a President who might decide to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on his own authority. Now, who might that President be?
In the annual defense policy bill that passed last week, Congress included a provision requiring a U.S. President to consult Congress before withdrawing from NATO. The bipartisan measure, sponsored by Sens. Tim Kaine (D., Va.) and Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), would require assent from two-thirds of the Senate or an act of Congress. The enforcement mechanism is withholding funds for such a withdrawal.
Congress’s concern here is clearly Mr. Trump. He has long disliked U.S. forward military deployments in places like South Korea, and he has railed against NATO in particular. “By some accounts,” he tweeted in 2018, “the U.S. is paying for 90% of NATO, with many countries nowhere close” to spending 2% of their economy on defense. The tweet ended with a signature “NO!”
Mr. Trump is right that the Europeans have allowed their defenses to atrophy to the point of embarrassment, though the picture is improving. Some 11 of 31 members meet the alliance goal of spending 2% of GDP on defense, up from three in 2014, according to data the alliance released over the summer.
In any case, American defense spending isn’t charity. A stable Europe is a core U.S. strategic interest, a lesson Americans learned twice in the 20th century at tremendous cost. The risks of abandoning NATO have compounded since Mr. Trump left office, with Russia’s Vladimir Putin launching a land war on the European continent.
But a bent toward isolationism is one of Mr. Trump’s core impulses. Former national security adviser John Bolton recounts in his memoirs that Mr. Trump unloaded on NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg that “NATO was egregious, complaining that Spain (he had just met the King) spent only 0.9% of its GDP on defense.” Mr. Bolton and others talked Mr. Trump out of trying to pull back from the alliance, only for him to ask again “why we didn’t just withdraw from NATO entirely.”
Mr. Trump’s rhetoric often exceeds his grasp, and he failed to follow through on many of his unilateral threats. But who knows what Mr. Trump might attempt as part of his promise to settle the war in Ukraine in “24 hours.”
The problem with Congress’s NATO provision is that it probably couldn’t stop a determined President. The Constitution grants broad powers to the Commander in Chief on foreign policy, and the precedents include George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and Jimmy Carter’s renegotiation of control over the Panama Canal. Congress could employ the power of the purse in an attempt to stop implementation of a withdrawal, but that couldn’t stop the actual decision.
The NATO provision is nonetheless useful in showing Europe that U.S. support for the alliances is strong and bipartisan. And for showing any isolationist President, whether a populist of the right or left, that the political price for withdrawal would be high.
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