Congress acted to protect NATO. But it might not be enough to stop Trump

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Lawmakers from both parties last December may have been anticipating former President Donald Trump’s current NATO trash talk when they quietly slipped language limiting a president’s power to pull the US out the alliance into the annual defense policy bill, which passed with bipartisan support.

Trump boasted at a weekend campaign rally that as president he told an unidentified NATO leader that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” with member countries who are in arrears on defense spending. The whole point of NATO is supposed to be that members act to defend each other if attacked.

President Joe Biden seized on Trump’s recent NATO bashing, suggesting in Tuesday remarks from the White House that Trump was the first president who “bowed down” to a Russian dictator, which Biden said was “dumb,” “shameful,” “dangerous” and “un-American.” Add that criticism to a chorus of alarm from NATO and European officials after Trump’s comments and in the midst of House Republicans’ blockage of additional aid for Ukraine.

Trump’s desire to pull out of NATO

The post-World War II alliance of Western democracies wasbuilt around NATO, but Trump has long complained that the US is getting a raw deal with the organization, paying too much and getting too little.

Trump’s ultimate goal, writes CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen, has long been to pull the US out of NATO, which was formed in 1949 to contain the threat of the Soviet Union and the spread of communism andis now organized around deterring Russian President Vladimir Putin.

CNN’s Jim Sciutto, in a forthcoming book, quotes