Foreign ministers of NATO member states are convening at a summit in Bucharest to discuss various matters concerning the alliance, including the ongoing armed conflict in Ukraine.
While the United States and its NATO allies have so far been fairly eager to provide a steady flow of money and weapons to Kiev, effectively fanning the flames of the conflict, quite a few people have expressed concerns that this situation may develop into a global war between Russia and NATO.
While some critics of the Biden administration do not seem fond of the role the US plays in this conflict, there are also people who wonder aloud whether remaining a part of NATO – an alliance created decades ago solely to oppose the Soviet Union – is such a good idea.
Bruce Fein
Prominent US lawyer Bruce Fein, who served as associate deputy attorney general under the Reagan administration, has suggested that the United States could put an end to the conflict in Ukraine simply by withdrawing from NATO.
By remaining in NATO, which lost its purpose since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, and by spearheading the military alliance’s expansion, the US essentially is helping to create an existential threat to Russia greater than “the existential threat the Cuban missile crisis posed to the United States," Fein argued in an op-ed published in a US media outlet last week.
Therefore, the lawyer suggested, US withdrawal from NATO could end this threat that “occasioned” Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, as well as “extinguish the executive branch’s ambition for regime change or weakening Russia.”
He also outlined a potential mechanism for this hypothetical withdrawal, noting how US Congress annulled a defense treaty with France in 1798.
Marjorie Taylor Greene
US politician and former Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene voiced similar concerns a few months earlier when she slammed the Biden administration for the military support it provides to Ukraine.
Arguing that the US leadership and NATO are basically dragging the United States into a war with Russia, Greene tweeted in June that there would be no winners in such a confrontation.
“Escalation over Ukraine, a non-member nation, risking nuclear war is a power play endangering the entire world,” she wrote. “We should pull out of NATO.”
Donald Trump
While the 45th president had been a vocal critic of the way other NATO members allegedly shirk their responsibilities, demanding that they pay their alliance dues in full, he also apparently questioned the US presence in that organization.
In June, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told media she has no doubt that the US would have left NATO if Trump were reelected in 2020.
In a book Trump penned in 2000, long before he became president, the then-real estate mogul argued that conflicts between warring factions in Europe simply aren’t worth US lives.
“Pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually. The cost of stationing NATO troops in Europe is enormous. And these are clearly funds that can be put to better use,” he wrote.
Collective Defense Issue
The concerns voiced by the proponents of US withdrawal from NATO got thrust into the limelight this month when an errant Ukrainian missile struck Poland, a NATO member.
While the NATO leadership and Poland concurred that the missile came from Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was quick to blame this incident on Russia, describing it as an attack on NATO members’ “collective security”.
If Zelensky’s accusations were true, this incident could have devolved into a full-blown direct conflict between the military alliance and Russia due to NATO’s collective defense mechanism that obliges all members to treat an attack against one of them as an attack against them all.
Members Only
The situation where at least some people advocate for the US leaving NATO can perhaps be considered somewhat ironic in light of the fact that, in the years following the demise of the Soviet Union, Russia proposed joining the military alliance on several occasions.
Though relations between Russia and NATO cooled following NATO’s attack on Serbia in 1999, Vladimir Putin, who became the president of Russia the following year, brought up the prospects of Moscow becoming a part of the alliance during the early years of his presidency.
Yet even as these initiatives ended being torpedoes by the NATO leadership, that did not deter the current NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg from claiming during his opening speech at the Aspen – GMF Bucharest Forum on Tuesday that it was Russia who “walked away” from constructive dialogue with NATO.
“There is no way we can continue the meaningful dialogue we tried to establish for many years with the behavior and the aggressive actions by Russia against Ukraine as we see now," he said.