Trump said in an interview with Britain’s Telegraph newspaper this week that he was seriously considering withdrawing the United States from the Western defense alliance, and described NATO as a "paper tiger."
Any move to leave would carry major consequences for the security of both Europe and America, the Polish state news agency said in its analysis piece.
NATO is a political and military alliance of 32 countries from Europe and North America. Poland joined in 1999, alongside the Czech Republic and Hungary, becoming one of the first former Eastern bloc states to enter the alliance.
The legal path to withdrawal is set out in Article 13 of the North Atlantic Treaty. Under that provision, a member can leave by giving formal notice to the US government, which serves as the treaty’s depositary, meaning the state that formally receives such notices and informs the other allies.
The exit would take effect one year after that notification.
For the United States, however, the issue is more complicated than a presidential declaration.
A law adopted in December 2023 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act blocks a president from withdrawing the country from NATO without political backing. It requires either support from two-thirds of the Senate or a separate act passed by both chambers of Congress.
That means a US withdrawal could not happen quickly. Even if a formal notice were issued, Washington would still remain bound by NATO commitments during the 12-month waiting period, while allies would face a year of diplomatic and military uncertainty.
No country has ever fully left NATO. Two members did temporarily step away from the alliance’s integrated military command structure, which coordinates joint defense planning and operations.
France withdrew from that military structure in 1966 under President Charles de Gaulle, who wanted greater independence from Washington. The move led NATO to shift its headquarters from Paris to Brussels in 1967. France remained a political member of the alliance and fully returned to NATO’s military structures in 2009 under President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Greece took a similar step in 1974 after Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus. Athens argued at the time that NATO had failed to prevent the conflict or defend Greek interests. Greece remained within the alliance politically and returned to the military structure in 1980.
NATO was founded in Washington in 1949. Its central purpose is collective defense, the idea that an attack on one ally is treated as an attack on all.
That principle is set out in Article 5 of the treaty, which has been invoked only once, after the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.
Polish security experts have said that a US withdrawal from NATO remains unlikely, but they warned that any serious rupture could tempt Russia to test Europe’s defenses.
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP