WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday appeared not to know that the only time that NATO’s mutual assistance clause has ever been invoked was on behalf of the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“If the United States was in trouble, and we called them, we said we got a problem … you think they’re going to come and protect us?” Trump told reporters in an Oval Office news conference in which he again suggested that the U.S. would not come to the aid of a NATO member if it had not “paid” enough.
“They’re supposed to, but I’m not so sure,” he said.
In his remarks, Trump seemed neither to understand how NATO functions nor to know that the alliance has only come to the assistance of an attacked signatory once: to fight in Afghanistan alongside U.S. troops against al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Trump has, since his first term, characterized NATO as sort of a protection racket, in which members must pay the United States money or not receive the benefit of the treaty’s “Article 5,” which states that an attack on one is an attack on all.
“When I first came in, we were paying almost 100% of NATO,” he said again Thursday, falsely.
In fact, member states pledged in 2014 to boost their defense spending to least 2% of their GDPs over a decade, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea region that year.
Of the 32 member nations, 24 have now reached that threshold, while some bordering or close to Russia are spending substantially more.
But even if a country does not meet that mark, it does mean the United States must pay more — rather, it means the total number of ships, planes and troops available to the alliance as a whole is not as high as it would be if each country met its obligation.
John Bolton, one of Trump’s first-term national security advisers, has said that Trump was planning to withdraw from NATO in his second term, had he won reelection in 2020.
In 2023, Congress passed a law prohibiting a president from withdrawing from NATO absent either two-thirds backing of the Senate or a new law. Some legal experts, though, believe Trump could override that, citing presidential prerogative in national security matters.
Such a move, were it to happen, would be a major accomplishment for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who has aspired to expand Russia’s borders back to that of the former Soviet Union.
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Three years ago Putin launched a full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine, which former President Joe Biden worked to oppose by building a European coalition. Trump, since taking office, has essentially switched sides, demanding that Ukraine give up territory to Russia and give the United States rights to its valuable mineral deposits while not asking any concessions at all from Putin.