On January 7, US president Donald Trump promised to withdraw the US from 35 international organizations and 31 UN agencies:
The Memorandum orders all Executive Departments and Agencies to cease participating in and funding 35 non-United Nations (UN) organizations and 31 UN entities that operate contrary to U.S. national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty.
Unverified: then the White House deleted the announcement from their website (personal note: I did receive 404 on it for a while).
Correction: announcement is still up or has reappeared. An archived copy is also available in case they change their mind.
Hopefully NATO is one of them and we can just rip the bandaid off now.
Edit: Huh, downvotes. Does Lemmy think NATO is in great shape and will definitely hold for the foreseeable future?
As it is, it’s in the way of other, more credible alliances forming, because nobody wants to weaken NATO. But, the moment the US does something in Greenland, all that delay will be for naught.
Please note: he can’t leave NATO by decree, the keys got taken to the Congress during Biden’s time. It’s among the few treaties a US president currently cannot leave.
Yeah just put it on the pile of other stuff he’s not legally allowed to do but he’s doing anyway
hope in one hand and take a shit in the other kinda dealio
takes a shit on your hands
…what? Is that not what you wanted?
He hasn’t exactly let that stop him before, especially since MAGA controls Congress.
To my understanding, there are multiple republican congress critters against leaving NATO - so, despite nominal MAGA control, no majority.
Did they actually vote that way? I wouldn’t trust any of them on their word.
TIL! Oh well.
The USA may be weak in their dedication to alliances and giving their now untrustworthy word to provide mutual defence, but we in Europe are not.
When a NATO nation is attacked and calls for aid, we will answer, as we have in the past when such threats and tyranny arose.
That is the promise of civilisation. That’s what separates us from the barbarians that would seek to destroy or enslave us all to build more power for themselves.
Yeah. I would trust NATO without America a lot more. That’s a kind of credible alternative organisation of it’s own, which their membership precludes.
Europe failed to fight the monster in their backyard, hence why we are where we are today.
So if the US genuinely invade that would be considered triggering Article V as the article doesn’t have an exemption clause of said invader being a different NATO Member.
Furthermore the way NATO is structured is it can’t function unless the US is at the steering wheel.
So forget NATO being weakened it would genuinely collapse. And as for replacements it would take years and the ball to transition hasn’t started rolling.
Sort of? Turkey actually tested this once. Since it was Turkey and Greece it all kind of just got smoothed over. If it was the US the entire thing becomes a farce, and the treaty is just a piece of paper.
Are you just thinking about all the US officers involved in running it? It’s not like the US actually, officially calls the shots.
Nope the Turkey Vs Greece was Turkey invading the Island of Cyprus which was considered independent of Greece, thus legally not a trigger for Article V.
Greece would of course come to the defense of Cyprus (the population was majority Greek Cypriote after all.) but still for all intents and purposes there was an argument that a NATO member wasn’t attacked.
Actually it does. That’s how ingrained the US is. NATO despite claiming shared corporation and use of unanimous voting is functionally set up so the actual governing and administration pillars are US controlled.
It’s not like the EU where the loss of the UK (only nation to leave after all) was just a shrug and move on like nothing happened.
If NATO lost the US multiple key institutions would be vacant till the remaining nations amend and restructure. A process that would take years to iron out
If NATO is just the US, why wasn’t it in Iraq? Because the US didn’t want help? I was there, that was not the message they were putting out.
The US wasn’t alone and did gather other NATO nations to invade Iraq.
But as to why NATO proper was not used it’s simply Iraq wasn’t a NATO member and the US (though not from lack of trying) couldn’t connect Iraq to 9/11 well enough to justify Article V’s use.
Oh, so there is more than the US’s say-so at play.
It’s almost like it’s a voluntary agreement to coordinate and defend each other. One which doesn’t intrinsically depend on the US in any way, but just happens to have the US as by far the largest member.
It’s voluntary yes but the US isn’t just the largest member but it’s baked into the system the US is in charge.
Think it like the situation with Amazon Web Services. When it shut down it took out roughly 2/3 of the websites with it. Essentially for all intents and purposes the core of the internet was gone and that had a nasty ripple effect.
That’s obstinately what would happen if the US was removed from NATO.
Oh, okay. AWS is actually a good analogy. It’s a huge pillar of the existing infrastructure, and if it was gone it would be a pretty huge, unprecedented crisis. The internet would still come back, though. (Since I’m on all alt platforms already, I actually didn’t notice it was down until I saw it on the news!)
Similarly, NATO would be in a bind, but I have every reason to think the considerable power and common interests of the remaining parties would see it through. One big question I’ve seen mentioned is the American officers that staff parts of it. Either they could keep working there even if the US is not a member, which is possible, or there would be just be a period of interruption to it’s coordination functions while the ranks are refilled. Since Britain and France are nuclear powers, just article 5 is a strong protection already, though.