Billionaire Elon Musk threw his weight behind a US exit from NATO, saying on his social media platform that it “doesn’t make sense for America to pay for the defense of Europe.”
The senior adviser to US President Donald Trump was responding to a post on X early Sunday that asserted the US should “Exit NATO *now*!”
“We really should,” the Tesla Inc. co-founder and chief executive officer said.
On March 3, Musk wrote on X he agreed with a suggestion by a conservative commentator that the US should leave both NATO and the United Nations.
Musk’s comments comes at a time when the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which will mark its 76th anniversary in April, hangs in the balance.
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NBC reported on March 6 that Trump had discussed with aides calibrating US engagement with NATO in a way which favors members of the alliance that spend a certain percentage of their GDP on defense.
Speaking to reporters the same day, Trump said he told NATO allies that if they’re not going to pay their bills, he won’t defend them.
“It’s common sense, right?” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “If they don’t pay, I’m not going to defend them. No, I’m not going to defend them.”
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Within NATO, Europe — which largely disarmed after the Cold War — is reliant on the US for communications, intelligence and logistics as well as strategic military leadership and firepower.
European Union leaders met in Brussels for an emergency summit last week with a view to massively increase defense spending.
The officials discussed a European Commission proposal that includes as much as €150 billion ($162.5 billion) in loans to member states for defense, as well as plans to allow countries to use their national budgets to potentially spend €650 billion on defense over four years without triggering budgetary penalties.
“In the last weeks, we’ve seen what I would call quite a turbulent development,” EU Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius said on Bloomberg TV on Friday. “It’s still not perhaps very clear what finally will be the American strategy.”
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Under a 2023 law, a president can’t unilaterally withdraw from the alliance without a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate or an act of Congress.
