‘Former US Prez will walk out of global alliances’
-: R Muthu Kumar :-
Global peace lovers always look at NATO with distrust due to the long list of wars and conflicts involving NATO countries leading to a grave challenge to global peace and stability. Former Trump, known as a maverick American leader, is echoing similar sentiments.
As US allies are worried over the return of Trump as US President following the elections later this year, many former Trump advisers warn that the Trump will seek to formally withdraw the US from the NATO alliance if he wins a second term.
As of 2024, no member State has rescinded its membership, although it has been considered by several countries.
The Return of Great Powers, a book to be released next month, penned by CNN anchor and chief national security analyst Jim Sciutto reveals that the US will be out of NATO if Trump becomes President again.
He quotes John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser as saying that “NATO would be in real jeopardy as I think he would try to get out”.
Trump’s disparagement of US security commitments extends to its mutual defence agreements with South Korea and Japan as well, retired General John Kelly, who served as White House chief of staff to Trump, told John Bolton.
Trump’s dislike of alliances abroad and American commitments to international organisations is no secret.
He has repeatedly and publicly challenged or withdrawn from a number of military and economic partnerships, from the Paris climate accord to the Asia-Pacific trade pact. He has questioned the United States’ military alliance with South Korea and Japan, and has announced a withdrawal of American troops from Syria without first consulting allies in the American-led coalition to defeat the Islamic State.
“The point is, he saw absolutely no point in NATO. He was just dead set against having troops in South Korea, again, a deterrent force, or having troops in Japan, a deterrent force,” Kelly said in the book.
“He thought (Vladimir) Putin was an okay guy and Kim (Jong Un) was an okay guy that we had pushed North Korea into a corner. “To him, it was like we were goading these guys. ‘If we didn’t have NATO, then Putin wouldn’t be doing these things’,” Kelly recalled.
At the core of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and enshrined in Article 5 of the treaty is the promise of collective defense – that an attack on one member nation is an attack on all the nations in the alliance. Trump has long complained about the amount NATO members spend on defense compared with the US.
In The Return of Great Powers, multiple advisors recount in detail how Trump very nearly removed the US from NATO at the alliance’s 2018 summit in Brussels.
In 2018, when Trump was the president, he repeatedly stated desire to withdraw from NATO is raising new worries among national security officials amid growing concern about Trump’s efforts.
“He was always ranting and raving and jumping up and down, and oftentimes he would spin up in terms of, ‘Well, I’m smarter than they are,’ and all of this,” Kelly said, describing Trump’s mindset in Brussels.
But at the summit, Trump persisted. Once Trump also issued orders to then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley and then Defense Secretary Mark Esper for the US to withdraw from NATO. Despite vehemently opposing the move. They considered the president’s direction a “lawful order” and drew up plans to execute the withdrawal.
NATO’s eastward expansion and the pressure it has been exerting on Russia are to blame for the ongoing Ukraine crisis and veterans of the Trump administration have warned about the waning interest to further help Ukraine too! senior US official who served under Trump and Biden are in unison on this issue.
US support for Taiwan, they say, would also be in jeopardy. Bolton recalled a stunt Trump would carry out in the Oval Office. “He would hold up the tip of his Sharpie pen and say, ‘That’s Taiwan. See this Resolute Desk, that’s China’.” His point, according to Bolton, is that Taiwan is too small to successfully defend itself against a Chinese invasion – and too small for the US to care.
Bolton recalled, “I mean, if I were in Taiwan, I would be very worried about a Trump administration.”
