John Bolton, who spent a year and a half as former President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, says Trump “threatened the existence of NATO.” He added that if Trump were to win a second term, he would likely pull the United States out of the alliance.
Bolton made the comments Thursday evening on NewsNation’s The Hill. Laying out Trump’s foreign policy failures, he condemned the former president for negotiating the deal with the Taliban to pull the U.S. out of Afghanistan. He also said Trump was too light with Iran after ending the nuclear deal, and continued to list things he felt Trump had done wrong on the world stage.
“He threatened the existence of NATO, and I think, in a second Trump term, would almost certainly withdraw from NATO,” Bolton said.
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NATO, or the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance, is a military alliance of 31 countries. Member states agree to defend each other should a non-NATO country attack. Though NATO protects against any non-member country, it was generally seen as a check against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and now against Russia.
Ukraine has requested membership to NATO, which Russia warned could cause World War Three.
“Kyiv is well aware that such a step would mean a guaranteed escalation to World War III,” Alexander Venediktov, deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council, said in October 2022. “The suicidal nature of such a step is understood by NATO members themselves.”
While Democrats generally are in favor of NATO, a Pew Research poll in May showed that Republican support dipped after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A majority of Republicans, 71%, told Pew that the U.S. should focus instead on domestic issues, rather than “be active in world affairs.”
Trump has been accused of being easy on Russia. In 2019, Trump made moves to pull the U.S. out of the Open Skies Treaty. The 1992 treaty allows signatories to share airspace with each other in order to monitor military moves. In practice, the Open Skies Treaty is used to monitor Russia’s military. At the time, U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel said that the proposed withdrawal “would only benefit Russia.”
The U.S. officially withdrew from the treaty in November 2020, shortly after the presidential election.