Marco Rubio’s Past Comes Back to Bite Him as Trump Threatens to Withdraw From NATO

(J. Scott Applewhite/AP photo)

It’s no secret that President Donald Trump has blustered about wanting to withdraw from NATO, but it’s a move he’s not authorized to make, thanks to his own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.

A 2023 bill co-sponsored by then-Senator Rubio and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) made it unlawful for the commander in chief to leave the North Atlantic Treaty Organization without Congressional approval.

The bill had bipartisan support and was approved by Congress in December 2023.

“No U.S. President should be able to withdraw from NATO without Senate approval,” Rubio said in an X post at the time. “Thankful my colleagues in Congress passed this bipartisan measure.”

That tweet made the rounds on social media on Wednesday, hours after Trump threatened to pull the U.S. out of NATO in a phone interview with The Telegraph.

Also on Wednesday, Face the Nation moderator Margaret Brennan reposted a 2023 clip from the show in which Rubio said he wrote the bill not with Trump in mind, but with the belief that it’s an “important alliance” and “Congress needs to play a role in deciding whether or not we’re going to remove ourselves from that.”

In the same clip, Rubio said, “I don’t believe Donald Trump will remove us from NATO.”

Last week, Rubio was asked for a response to Trump’s claims that NATO is a “paper tiger,” to which he replied:

I think [Trump] just made an observation, and the observation is that the United States is constantly being asked to help in a war, and we have more than any other country in the world on a war that’s happening in another content — in Ukraine. But, when the U.S. had a need, he didn’t get positive responses. So, right now, he’s just making the observation, you know, I think there’s a couple leaders in Europe who said that this was not Europe’s war. Well, Ukraine is not America’s war and yet we’ve contributed more to that fight than any other country in the world, so it’ll be something to examine — the president will have to take into account down the road.

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