Several days after President Trump’s new National Security Strategy document, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) on Dec. 9 introduced a resolution to withdraw the U.S. from NATO. “NATO is a Cold War relic,” said Massie, according to an announcement on his website. “We should withdraw from NATO and use that money to defend our own country, not socialist countries. NATO was created to counter the Soviet Union, which collapsed over thirty years ago. Since then, U.S. participation has cost taxpayers trillions of dollars and continues to risk U.S. involvement in foreign wars. Our Constitution did not authorize permanent foreign entanglements, something our Founding Fathers explicitly warned us against. America should not be the world’s security blanket—especially when wealthy countries refuse to pay for their own defense.”
Massie’s “NATO Act,” or as he titled it, the “Not A Trusted Organization Act,” leans heavily on NATO’s role as a provocateur more than a defensive alliance. “NATO was intended to counterbalance the political and military power of the Soviet Union,” it claims, a mission which became “irrelevant” following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It cites the fact that Secretary of State James Baker made assurances to Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev “that NATO would not expand eastward.” Despite this, it goes on, NATO has continued to expand all the way up to 2025, including directly on the borders of Russia, a fact which Russia has explicitly stated is a “pervasive threat to Russian security.”
The act goes on to lean heavily into the Trump accusations that NATO members don’t pay their fair share, and that the U.S. “subsidizes” European security. Also, it emphasizes that “Europe is not a priority theater for United States engagement,” and therefore, NATO membership is “inconsistent with the national security interests of the United States.”
Rep. Anna Paulina-Luna (R-FL) has said she is willing to become a co-sponsor of Massie’s bill in the House, and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has already introduced a companion bill into the Senate.
