IF HE BECOMES president again, a recently run wargame determined NATO could collapse under another Trump administration.
Donald Trump loves to complain about NATO and what he perceives as member nations not contributing enough financially to shared defense. He has threatened to put the U.S. on a "standby" position in NATO if member nations don't bend to his will.
The wargame, run by British defense expert Finley Grimble, predicted that even if Trump doesn't fully withdraw the U.S. from NATO, the organization could fall apart, Business Insider reported Sunday.
"A US policy of frustrating NATO has the potential to cause the alliance to collapse, with the EU as a candidate for eventually replacing NATO's ultimate function — defending Europe from Russia," Grimble, who served as wargamer and strategy advisor to the UK government, wrote on PAXsims.
According to the current National Defense Authorization Act, the president cannot “suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw” the U.S. from NATO without the "advice and consent" of a two-thirds majority of the Senate. But that doesn't mean that a president couldn't do serious damage to the treaty partnership without fully withdrawing.
What Donald Trump can do is just really hollow out what NATO does,” Grimble told Business Insider. "He doesn't need to leave NATO to ruin it. He can ruin it from within.”
U.K. experts in defense and intelligence participated in the wargame, playing the leaders of various countries. In the simulation, Trump took office and attempted to arrange a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, with assistance from Turkey while excluding other European nations. When the deal failed to materialize, Trump severely restricted U.S. aid to Ukraine, and other nations moved to “fill the void.”
The simulation Trump's next step was to go into "dormancy" in NATO (similar to Trump's threat to go on "standby") and withdraw half of the 100,000 U.S. troops currently deployed in Europe, sending them to the Indo-Pacific and decreasing U.S. involvement in NATO exercises. The simulated U.S. government then prohibited NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (the SACEUR, who is always a U.S. official) from acting without first getting permission from the U.S.