According to US media, some former White House and Pentagon officials said that if Mr. Trump was re-elected for a second term, he could end his membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of America.
Accordingly, The New York Times revealed that former US government officials were concerned that if re-elected for a second term, Donald Trump could withdraw the US from NATO, even before that time.
This newspaper said Trump had thought about the US withdrawal from NATO in 2018. However, ahead of the election in November, new evidence emerged confirming his intentions.
The US publication recounts that over the summer, John Bolton, the former US President’s National Security Assistant, released a memoir in which he claimed that Trump repeatedly announced he wanted to leave the NATO alliance. In August, in an interview with the media, Mr. Bolton said the president could announce the US withdrawal from NATO even before the election.
Commenting on this issue, News Institute member Vladimir Kozin of the Russian Institute of Military Science, the leading expert of the MGIMO Center for Political-Military Research commented, the American newspaper article is an excessive worry.
He said that this information has not been verified. Even though President Donald Trump has been dissatisfied with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization many times, it does not mean that Trump will leave this organization.
Since its establishment up to now, the United States has played a major role in the organization, so the US has always called for solidarity and expanded interaction of the armed forces of allied member countries.
Furthermore, Mr. Trump tries to adopt his idea that all nations in the coalition will reach military spending of 2% of GDP. Trump has set a mandate for all NATO countries to achieve that level of military spending by 2024 and today, nine countries have reached this level.
Military expert Kozin noted that Trump has repeatedly expressed his opinion on the need to further increase military spending to 4% of GDP, because he thinks that the United States is giving it to military and the size of the economy, each year the US is contributing more than 700 billion USD to the overall military of the bloc, more than the total military costs of the next 10 countries; so should NATO countries.