The President has the authority to withdraw from a treaty on behalf of the United States, and President Trump should immediately withdraw the U.S. from NATO. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s performance at a photo op in the Oval Office last week affords the U.S. a golden opportunity to walk away from a European war that serves no American interests, but the opportunity is even greater than that. We are witnessing the rise of populist movements in the U.S. and across Europe that reject the post-WWII neoliberal globalist establishment (hereafter “Establishment”), and President Trump could strike a resounding blow against that Establishment by leaving NATO, which hosts the Establishment’s transatlantic military-industrial complex. Neocons’ and Euroglobalists’ visceral reaction to President Trump’s unwillingness to satisfy Zelensky’s demands for weapons and cash underscores that they see a threat to the power structure that has employed and enriched so many of them and to the ideology of neoliberal “democracy” they have used to manufacture support for the U.S.-European Establishment. Donald Trump can deliver a gutpunch to the adversaries of peace, freedom, and American independence by leading the U.S. out of NATO and to the founders’ foreign policy of serving American interests by staying resolutely out of European political intrigues and recurring bloody wars.
American Memory Hole: …
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With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, precipitated by the inability of the Soviet bloc’s command economies to perform (demonstrating in history Mises’ proof that socialist economic calculation is impossible), NATO’s raison d’etre evaporated. No longer able to rely on the idea that Soviet tanks might come roaring through the Fulda Gap in Germany, NATO stepped into the void left by the Warsaw Pact’s demise by adding a dozen former communist states and former Soviet Republics into NATO to further weaken the USSR’s remnant of Russia and to advance the ideology of neoliberal “democracy.” The former communist states sought NATO membership for obvious security reasons, and NATO expansion ramped up during George W. Bush’s administration, with seven East European members added in 2004. Bush II and the neocons saw NATO as a vehicle to project power globally, so not only did they grow NATO to the east, but they also invoked NATO’s Article V to make their war in Afghanistan a NATO operation. As a result, the the Afghan War was NATO’s largest operation to date, replete with United Nations Security Council Resolutions to confer a globalist imprimatur on what became a twenty-year war.
Fueling war is big business. NATO members spent $1.47 trillion in 2024 on military spending alone, and while NATO itself hosts the vast military-industrial complex of its member states, it is more than defense contractors and state bureaucrats, in and out of uniform, who make money from NATO. NATO and member states provide grants to NGOs, and defense contractors pay neocon and globalist think tanks to promote the ideology of protecting and promoting neoliberal “democracy” through military spending and war. The revolving door among the state security, foreign policy, and surveillance bureaucracies, the arms industry, and a variety of “humanitarian” and “democracy-building” NGOs offer an expansive network of lucrative employment and consulting opportunities for those with the proper resume from the defense and state apparatus. These people need NATO to continue and to find a mission, and with the Afghanistan war over, Eastern Europe provides NATO with a mission and a war. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has spurred dramatic increases in defense spending in Europe and increases in U.S. and European military aid to Ukraine. It is no wonder that American and European globalists are devoting their full energy to asserting that a complete military victory in Ukraine is essential to “democracy” and Western security, including the claim that Russia, which cannot defeat Ukraine, will somehow invade Western Europe and the United States. It is as if we were living in the 1960s and NATO was in its heyday once again.
The real existential threat is not to “democracy,” but instead to the international bureaucratic, business, and ideological structure seeking to perpetuate itself via NATO. It must find a threat to give it a reason to continue to soak up trillions in defense and political spending, and it will seek to convince you that your life depends on it. But a countervailing tide is rising against the globalist structures such as NATO and the European Union, and this is happening in both Europe and the United States. Donald Trump’s reelection reflects that populist movement in the United States and the weariness of Americans being bound to international commitments whose relevance to their lives they do not see. The Establishment, its media allies, and its followers accuse them of disloyalty when they question these commitments, and this isn’t the first time. In the lead-up to the First World War, Americans who questioned the U.S. interest in that European war were accused of being pro-German by the Progressive establishment of the day, and many were prosecuted and jailed. In the lead-up to the Second World War, Americans who questioned the U.S. interest in the new European War were accused again of being pro-German, and many were investigated and surveilled by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. During the Cold War, the FBI and CIA investigated and surveilled antiwar activists who questioned U.S. global military commitments and who were for that reason accused of being communist sympathizers. The current Establishment uses the same technique of demonizing its opponents, accusing those who question absolute, open-ended military and financial commitments of being pro-Russian, as if good faith disagreement over these matters were impossible. Many neocons and globalists no doubt believe their own narrative and cannot fathom that anyone would disagree with them. Thus, they will call for censoring, investigating, surveilling, and doing all they can to shut down those who don’t follow their line. In Europe, they have gone so far as to nullify an election and seek to ban their opponents from elections in the name of saving “democracy,” and they will do all these things with a straight face, and maybe even believe themselves.
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Last week’s Oval Office debacle offers those who support American independence in foreign policy an opportunity. Americans who saw more than the last few minutes of the video shared in the legacy media saw a foreign political leader making demands for American air defense weapons and money on the U.S. President and Vice President. These kinds of demands, of course, are generally made behind closed doors rather than in a media photo op, but those Americans who saw this caught a glimpse of the European sense of entitlement to American military and financial support. In this moment, it may become thinkable to the ordinary American that we don’t need this and can walk away. And so we can. Because Trump considered leaving NATO in his first term, last year’s Democratic-controlled Congress sought to prohibit President Trump from withdrawing from NATO, purporting to require Senate approval, which is almost certainly an unconstitutional abridgement of Presidential authority in foreign affairs. President Trump can abrogate U.S. treaty obligations to NATO and obtain congressional support to end its U.S. funding. In doing so, he will strike a blow against his political adversaries at home and the globalist adversaries of the political movement in Europe that share his populism and drive for independence from globalist elites. The U.S. would again be free to seek to rebuild its founders’ policy, articulated by Jefferson as one of “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none.”
