Sen. Thom Tillis said Thursday that any move by President Trump to withdraw from the NATO alliance would spark unified opposition from Congress that would be historically unprecedented.
“There would be nothing more unifying that any president whether it’s Trump or pick one of the 20 people planning on running in 2020, if they were to actually seriously withdraw from NATO I think it would create a unifying event unlike anything you’ve seen in U.S. history in terms of actions that we can take,” said Tillis, a leading member of the Senate’s NATO Observer Group and a member of the Armed Services Committee.
Tillis spoke about NATO at a Washington think tank along with Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, who also sits on both Senate bodies, but said he would not discuss what specific actions Congress might take to block a “hypothetical” withdrawal from the alliance.
“It’s not just resolutions of disapproval or some sort of sense of the Senate at a 60-vote threshold. I honestly believe that the same 97-2 vote would be the kind of vote that we would have for congressional action for any number of things that we could do,” Tillis said. “And I’m not going to get into specifics because then the press will play that up and speculate on what that would be.
“Make no mistake about it: I do not believe that the president has any intention of withdrawing from NATO,” he said.
The appearance by Tillis and Shaheen comes after Trump questioned why the U.S. would come to the aid of newly admitted NATO member Montenegro earlier this week and attended a combative summit with members in Europe who he criticized for spending too little on national defense.
Shaheen said the president’s performance at the NATO summit as well as a trip to the United Kingdom where he gave an interview critical of Prime Minister Theresa May, and a controversial summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin is taking its toll on the alliance.
“I think that there are only so many times that that can happen and it begins to chip away at the belief that the United States is a reliable ally that can be counted on and that is the problem that I think we are facing,” Shaheen said.
