Congress has approved legislation that would prevent any president from withdrawing the United States from NATO without approval from the Senate or an Act of Congress. The measure, spearheaded by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), was included in the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which passed out of the House on Thursday and is expected to be signed by President Biden.
The constitution only explicitly articulates the process for establishing treaties, not ending them. So it’s a bit of a gray area as to whether the president can end them by himself, since he can’t establish them by himself.
To my mind, it would seem exceedingly weird if establishing a treaty required the consent of the Senate but breaking one didn’t. What’s the argument to be made that the two aspects (establish/break) are so fundamentally different that the rules for the first aren’t also the rules for the second? Why does the president need consent to say yes but does not need consent to say no?
It’s definitely been done before, but also never directly contested. (In previous cases SCOTUS has avoided answering the question by saying they didn’t have jurisdiction.)
I don’t want to argue the specifics of breaking/establishing a general treaty (though i’m sure that is an amazingly interesting analysis). But I do want to discuss at a naive level the results of a US president refusing to enforce NATO. Without being overly factual, I understand NATO to be a mutual defense treaty ratified and renegotiated from the post-ww2 era til now. It was created by the US and former Allied Forces except Russia, to contain perceived Russian/Communist aggression.
From the genesis of this treaty( 1948), the US was understood to be the “enforcer” of it. Sure other nations would support the US and generally contribute to Article5, but in-practice and dollars, the US legitimized NATO.
So if a modern US president decided to publicly announce that he would no-longer respect NATO without additional justifications, how can the Senate enforce NATO without the US President and thus the Armed Forces support?