Trump strongly considering pulling out of NATO: The Telegraph

And he's been building, he's been setting up straw men against NATO and knocking them down now for about a decade. He will come up with another built-in excuse to get rid of the alliance that Vladimir Putin fears the most, NATO. And he's saying that, Joe, explicitly this morning. The Telegraph just posted a new interview this morning in which President Trump says he is strongly considering pulling the United States out of NATO after it failed to join his war in Iran. He said, quote, I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger. And Putin knows that, too, by the way. Well, no, back in 2024, President Biden signed a law that prevents any U.S. president from unilaterally withdrawing the United States from NATO without congressional approval. Perhaps, Jonathan Lemire, seeing this very moment coming from President Trump. Yeah, President Trump, of course, nearly, he wanted to pull the U.S. out of NATO in his first term. I was there at the Brussels headquarters of NATO in 2018, a few days before his Helsinki summit with Putin. And Trump was so angry that European members weren't paying their dues that he tried to pull out. He was talked out of it then, but has for years railed against NATO. And, of course, now is upset he feels they didn't come to their aid at the Strait of Hormuz. First of all, you're right. There's a law against. He can't just withdraw. This is also NATO's treaty, so therefore the act of Congress. However, there are things he could do here to really dramatically weaken NATO. And my colleague and I at The Atlantic wrote about this last week. One thing that European leaders are fearful of is that he could withdraw U.S. troops from the region. So, yes, technically we'd be in NATO, but if we don't have service members at our bases, well, that sort of defeats the purpose. And Russia could look at the continent as a much more inviting target. He also could slash funding to NATO. So even if he can't truly withdraw, there are things he could do to really weaken the alliance. And that would be literally Vladimir Putin's life work would be to weaken that alliance, which was built as a bulwark against Russian aggression. Yeah. And David Ignatius is in the moment is about the war in Iran. The president starts a war and then he's mad at our allies for not joining the war. That's not how NATO works. That's a different conversation, perhaps. But you have Spain and Italy saying you can't use our airspace to fly over for your war. That has angered the president as well. But this is a deep seated dislike, let's just put it, the president has for some reason for NATO. And as John said, this truly is this is the dream of Vladimir Putin. He found a president who's willing to turn its back on NATO and he can continue to roll into Ukraine and perhaps further. So really, if the president follows through on this talk and really pulls the U.S. back from NATO, that will be the event that will define this this moment. The NATO alliance is absolutely central to U.S. security and how the world works. Europeans that I talk to already feel that they're on their own. They see a very threatening Russia at their borders. They see the United States increasingly uninterested in working with them. And they're thinking they're going to have to beef up their militaries. They're going to have to change the way they look at conflict. Many European leaders say to me, we we think we're already at war with Russia and we know we have to rely on ourselves. So it's going to be a different future. We say that often with Donald Trump. But nothing could be more different than this, than the effective unwinding of NATO, something that I think of Nika's dad, the decades that he fought to build that up, the way he saw it as crucial to defeating the Soviet Union. And here, you know, almost on a whim, it sometimes seems Donald Trump is saying that's that's it. I've had it. It's hard to imagine. I mean, it's hard to imagine. Oh, you look through the years from 1947 on that all of the all of the people across the West, in the United States and Great Britain, all of our allies across NATO, how much they worked to push back Russian aggression, to push back the Soviet Union, to liberate 100 million people in Eastern Europe. They did that. And now, David, you look and see the president is clearly lining up on the side of Vladimir Putin. And we can talk about NATO. What what is bad for NATO is Vladimir is good for Vladimir Putin. Donald Trump knows that Marco Rubio knows that. But also yesterday, we had Michael Weiss on, I believe, after after he got off the show and Michael Weiss had the reporting and had recorded conversations of of of Hungary and Russia colluding with each other, trying to do anything desperately to help to help Orban survive. Of course, we heard the reports over the past couple of weeks also that Russia was was talking about the possibility of faking an assassination before the presidential election to help Orban. And and so you have all of this collusion. I love I'd love for people to call this a Russia hoax as well. Yeah, it's no hoax. This is happening. And so you have this very bizarre thing that would have been unimaginable to Dr. Brzezinski and the people who served this country honorably for decades to see Vladimir Putin, Sergei Lavrov, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump all desperately working to try to hold up a man's political career who works day and night to undermine Western democracy and to help Vladimir Putin. And that, of course, is Orban, who has an election coming up. And right now, both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are freaking out that that that Orban, this illiberal thug, might actually lose. So, Joe, I think one of the things that lies ahead, taking Trump at his word is that Europe is going to have to work more closely with key Asian countries, including China, to reopen the strait and establish a new order there, working with Iran, the U.S. having pulled back that that has some some pluses. I'm glad to see the Europeans involved in their economic security. Maybe they should be helping to reopen the strait. President Trump has been right about that. But if they do it on their own, without the United States as the leader of that coalition, it's a very different world. It's hard to imagine an arrangement for the security of oil transit out of the Strait of Hormuz that basically doesn't involve the U.S. That's been at the center of our foreign policy since before I was born. And if it's really going out the window, that's a different world. Hello, Republicans. Still ahead on Morning Joe, we'll dig into the. Well, I think that should be more serious. Wake up, Republicans. We understand you need to suck up to the president of the United States. We understand that for a second. Why don't you just maybe take a break from from shooting clays in Edgefield County and actually be a patriot and push back on the president supporting an illiberal thug who's helping Vladimir Putin push back on this talk about NATO, push back on a president who is trying to undermine and he's doing it openly. He's trying to undermine the alliance that took down the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin hates that. He said that was one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century. Others would say taking down a regime that imprisoned an entire continent actually was a good thing. They would also say having NATO there. So Vladimir Putin doesn't continue his war in in Ukraine and then go into Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland. You can just keep taking them off. You can't turn away from this. Yeah. I mean, you Republicans wake up. We're going to speak up now. We're going to.