President Trump told a Reuters reporter on Wednesday that he is "absolutely" considering pulling the United States out of NATO, escalating a confrontation with European allies that has been building for weeks over the Iran conflict.
Asked by Reuters reporter Steve Holland whether he was weighing leaving the transatlantic alliance, Trump responded bluntly.
"Oh, absolutely without question. Wouldn't you do that if you were me?"
According to the New York Post, the president said he will use a forthcoming primetime address to lay out his case. "I'll be discussing my disgust with NATO," he told reporters, framing the speech around Europe's refusal to support American operations during the monthlong Iran conflict.
Trump also told The Telegraph that NATO's future is "beyond reconsideration," a phrase that leaves little room for diplomatic interpretation.
Whatever one thinks about the future of NATO, the sequence of events leading to this moment makes Europe's position nearly impossible to defend on its own terms.
The alliance exists, in theory, as a mutual defense pact. In practice, European members spent the last month actively obstructing American military operations:
Read Macron's full statement and consider what it means for the concept of an "alliance":
"France will never take part in operations to open or liberate the Strait of Hormuz."
Never. Not "we have concerns about the timeline." Not "we'd like to be consulted." Never. That is not the language of an ally negotiating terms. That is the language of a country that wants the benefits of American security guarantees without any of the reciprocal obligations.
Trump, for his part, made clear he sees through the arrangement. He said he was "never swayed by NATO," calling the alliance "a paper tiger," and adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin "knows that too, by the way."
Withdrawing from NATO is not as simple as a presidential declaration, and the legislative landscape reflects that. Former President Joe Biden, in 2023, signed legislation coauthored by then-Sen. Marco Rubio, now Trump's secretary of state, that bars any president from withdrawing from NATO without congressional consent.
That law creates a genuine constitutional tension. The Senate ratified the treaty establishing NATO in 1949 at the start of the Cold War, but unilateral presidential withdrawal from treaties has become the norm in American foreign policy. Trump himself has previously exited pacts on climate change and arms control. Whether the 2023 law can constitutionally restrict the president's treaty powers is an unresolved question, and one that this confrontation may force into the open.
The irony that Rubio coauthored the very law that could constrain his own boss is worth noting. It also illustrates how rapidly the ground has shifted. The NATO that existed when that legislation passed is not the NATO that spent the last month denying American planes permission to land.
NATO's defenders will argue the alliance remains essential to European security, pointing to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine as proof. But the alliance's own behavior tells a different story.
The pact expanded aggressively toward Russia's frontier with the addition of Poland in 1999 and the three Baltic nations, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, in 2004. That expansion carried implicit promises of American military commitment to an ever-wider perimeter. Yet when the United States needed operational support from these same allies, it received closed airspace and diplomatic lectures.
Trump shifted the responsibility of footing the bill for US weapons sent to Ukraine onto NATO allies last year. He said last month that the UK "took far too much time" to allow US forces to use certain bases. The pattern is consistent: Europe wants American protection but resists American leadership the moment it requires anything of them.
This is not an alliance. It is a dependency arrangement that runs in one direction.
Presidents do not schedule primetime addresses to float trial balloons. They schedule them to set agendas. By taking the NATO confrontation to a national audience in the context of the Iran war, Trump is making a calculated move to let the American public see exactly what their European "partners" have been doing while American servicemembers operate in the Middle East.
The political logic is straightforward. Most Americans have no idea that Spain closed its airspace to US warplanes this week, or that Italy turned away American jets from a base in Sicily. A primetime address changes that. It transforms an inside-the-Beltway foreign policy debate into a kitchen-table question: why are we defending countries that won't let us use their runways?
The European leaders who spent the last month grandstanding may soon discover that the audience they were playing to was much smaller than the one now watching.