The former president reportedly said he wouldn\u2019t staff a future administration with figures who support the military bloc.
Former US President Donald Trump has discussed pulling the country out of NATO or dramatically scaling back America\u2019s commitment to the bloc if he wins the 2024 election, Rolling Stone magazine reported on Monday.
Citing two sources who allegedly heard him make the comments, Rolling Stone claimed that Trump has expressed openness to leaving NATO altogether, or remaining in the military alliance if its European members increase their defense spending and scrap Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty \u2013 which treats an attack on one member state as an attack on all 31.
\u201cStarting World War III\u201d over some of the bloc\u2019s smaller members makes no sense, Trump vented to his advisers in mid-2018, arguing that most Americans had never even heard of some of these countries. Attributed to a \u2018former senior administration official\u2019, this anecdote backs up what former National Security Advisor John Bolton told the Washington Post last year: that Trump was ready to announce the US departure from NATO at the bloc\u2019s 2018 summit, but ultimately backed down on Bolton\u2019s advice.
\u201cIn a second Trump term, I think he may well have withdrawn from NATO,\u201d Bolton said at the time.
With conflict raging in Ukraine and NATO\u2019s Eastern European and Baltic members urging the alliance to step up its military aid to Kiev, Trump has repeatedly warned of the likelihood of \u201cWorld War III\u201d breaking out in Europe. If elected, Trump has promised to cut off military aid to Ukraine and force its president, Vladimir Zelenzky, to negotiate a peace deal with Russia.
In a campaign video released earlier this year, Trump blamed the conflict on \u201call the warmongers and \u2018America Last\u2019 globalists in the Deep State, the Pentagon, the State Department and the national security industrial complex,\u201d who he said were \u201cobsessed with pushing Ukraine towards NATO.\u201d
According to Rolling Stone\u2019s sources, Trump has made it clear that his second administration would not be staffed by \u201cNATO lovers.\u201d
The sources said that Trump studied a policy proposal by conservative writer Dr. Sumantra Maitra earlier this year entitled \u2018Pivoting the US Away from Europe to a Dormant NATO\u2019 and liked some of its ideas. In the paper, Maitra wrote that \u201cthe NATO bureaucracy\u201d is \u201cprone to push missions that are beyond NATO\u2019s core role and, at times, opposed to the domestic interests of the United States. Radically reducing the NATO bureaucracy should be a chief aim.\u201d
\u201cHe still wants out,\u201d one Trump adviser told Rolling Stone. The aide acknowledged that Trump might not actually follow through on this desire, but \u201cwants a policy team around him nowadays that is much, much tougher on NATO than anything he\u2019s done in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n