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Notes -
What makes the 'stay in NATO' thing so amusing/frustrating is that it's not actually based on a Trump claim to want to leave NATO. 'Leaving NATO' is the political reframing attack. What was actually said could be interpreted as even worse- that he wouldn't act to support countries that weren't spending on their own defense- which doesn't require leaving NATO in the first place.
This is arguably worse- much worse!- both from a treaty-obligation perspective (it is better to leave a treaty than violate while claiming the benefits of membership) and from a NATO-credibility perspective (it says the quiet part out loud that Article 5 doesn't actually require NATO members to do anything specific).
In some respects it would even be preferable for the EU-Europeans to have the Americans leave NATO, so that the EU could functionally absorb NATO as an EU organ rather than an institution in perpetual competition for the same role that is necessary for EU-centralization fantasies. A constant issue in the EU-centralization and defense spheres is that EU-military efforts are duplicative to NATO, are often opposed when they come into conflict with NATO, but at the same time without defense credibility EU-centralization itself loses credibility.
Letting the US leave NATO clears a lot of that by letting someone else more European come to lead it. Which... has been an explicit goal for some since its inception. Many people forget / never knew that France left the NATO command structure in the Cold War after its failed attempts to play a decisive leading role in it as a founding member (partly disproven by US pressure during the Suez Crisis). (Which was rather the point. The US inclusion in NATO wasn't simply as a counter-balance against the Soviets, but to counter the influence of Germany and France over other, smaller, European countries.)
If the US were to leave NATO- and thus create a precedent for countries departing / being forced to depart from it- then NATO could credibly be replaced by EU institutions that had the same European-consolidating effect with an opt-in measure for the non-EU allies (i.e. the US, Canada, Turkey, the UK, and so on). Because there wouldn't be a loss of US participation, this would greatly increase the influence of key EU members (France and Germany) over NATO-style standardization, defense procurement, and coordination efforts, while inheriting many of the systems and existing institutional elements of NATO rather than recreate them.
It would also be an extreme shift in the power dynamic between the EU and NATO-but-not-EU-periphery members that would be highly appealing to some states (Albania, hypothetical Ukraine), but at substantial expense to others (think UK, Turkey). Depending on your point of view, that could be a substantial advantage- such as a strong incentive/pressure for the UK to re-enter the EU, or giving Greece and Cyprus more leverage against Turkey.
But- notably- these sort of European-centric defense changes only occur if Trump takes the US out of NATO- which he has not threatened to do- rather than have Trump compromise NATO from within but keep it from the influence of EU-centralicists- which is even worse.
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