According to a Rolling Stone magazine article, Trump is planning to withdraw the US from NATO once he wins the 2024 election, but he might not follow through on that desire.
If he wins the 2024 election, former US President Donald Trump has talked of leaving NATO or drastically reducing the US’s commitment to the organization, according to a Rolling Stone magazine article published on Monday.
Rolling Stone said that Trump had stated that he would be willing to leave NATO entirely or stay if its European members increased their defense spending and removed Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which treats an attack on one member state as an attack on all 31. The publication cited two sources who allegedly heard Trump make the remarks.
In mid-2018, Trump angrily told his advisers, “Starting World War III over some of the bloc’s smaller members makes no sense,” claiming that most Americans were unaware of some of these nations. This tale, attributed to a “former senior administration official,” supports John Bolton’s statement to the Washington Post last year that Trump was prepared to declare the US withdrawal from NATO during the bloc’s 2018 summit but ultimately reneged on Bolton’s advice.
“In a second Trump term, I think he may well have withdrawn from NATO,” Bolton said at the time.
With the crisis in Ukraine blazing and NATO members from Eastern Europe and the Baltics calling on the alliance to increase military support for Kiev, Trump has issued repeated warnings about the possibility that “World War III” would break out in Europe. Should Trump win, he has pledged to stop providing military support to Ukraine and compel Vladimir Zelensky, the country’s president, to engage in peace negotiations 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” in a campaign video that was made public earlier this year. He claimed that these individuals were “obsessed with pushing Ukraine towards NATO.”
The Finnish National Bureau of Investigation is investigating the possibility of a Chinese sabotage of the Baltic Connector Pipeline between Sweden and Finland.
Trump has made it plain that “NATO lovers” would not work in his second administration, according to Rolling Stone’s sources.
According to the sources, Trump studied 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. In the paper, Maitra wrote that “the NATO bureaucracy” is “prone to push missions that are beyond NATO’s core role and, at times, opposed to the domestic interests of the United States. Radically reducing the NATO bureaucracy should be a chief aim.”
“He still wants out,” one Trump adviser told Rolling Stone. The aide acknowledged that Trump might not actually follow through on this desire, but “wants a policy team around him nowadays that is much, much tougher on NATO than anything he’s done in the past.”