On January 7, US president Donald Trump promised to withdraw the US from 35 international organizations and 31 UN agencies:
The Memorandum orders all Executive Departments and Agencies to cease participating in and funding 35 non-United Nations (UN) organizations and 31 UN entities that operate contrary to U.S. national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty.
Unverified: then the White House deleted the announcement from their website (personal note: I did receive 404 on it for a while).
Correction: announcement is still up or has reappeared. An archived copy is also available in case they change their mind.
Sort of? Turkey actually tested this once. Since it was Turkey and Greece it all kind of just got smoothed over. If it was the US the entire thing becomes a farce, and the treaty is just a piece of paper.
Are you just thinking about all the US officers involved in running it? It’s not like the US actually, officially calls the shots.
Nope the Turkey Vs Greece was Turkey invading the Island of Cyprus which was considered independent of Greece, thus legally not a trigger for Article V.
Greece would of course come to the defense of Cyprus (the population was majority Greek Cypriote after all.) but still for all intents and purposes there was an argument that a NATO member wasn’t attacked.
Actually it does. That’s how ingrained the US is. NATO despite claiming shared corporation and use of unanimous voting is functionally set up so the actual governing and administration pillars are US controlled.
It’s not like the EU where the loss of the UK (only nation to leave after all) was just a shrug and move on like nothing happened.
If NATO lost the US multiple key institutions would be vacant till the remaining nations amend and restructure. A process that would take years to iron out
If NATO is just the US, why wasn’t it in Iraq? Because the US didn’t want help? I was there, that was not the message they were putting out.
The US wasn’t alone and did gather other NATO nations to invade Iraq.
But as to why NATO proper was not used it’s simply Iraq wasn’t a NATO member and the US (though not from lack of trying) couldn’t connect Iraq to 9/11 well enough to justify Article V’s use.
Oh, so there is more than the US’s say-so at play.
It’s almost like it’s a voluntary agreement to coordinate and defend each other. One which doesn’t intrinsically depend on the US in any way, but just happens to have the US as by far the largest member.
It’s voluntary yes but the US isn’t just the largest member but it’s baked into the system the US is in charge.
Think it like the situation with Amazon Web Services. When it shut down it took out roughly 2/3 of the websites with it. Essentially for all intents and purposes the core of the internet was gone and that had a nasty ripple effect.
That’s obstinately what would happen if the US was removed from NATO.
Oh, okay. AWS is actually a good analogy. It’s a huge pillar of the existing infrastructure, and if it was gone it would be a pretty huge, unprecedented crisis. The internet would still come back, though. (Since I’m on all alt platforms already, I actually didn’t notice it was down until I saw it on the news!)
Similarly, NATO would be in a bind, but I have every reason to think the considerable power and common interests of the remaining parties would see it through. One big question I’ve seen mentioned is the American officers that staff parts of it. Either they could keep working there even if the US is not a member, which is possible, or there would be just be a period of interruption to it’s coordination functions while the ranks are refilled. Since Britain and France are nuclear powers, just article 5 is a strong protection already, though.
Yes it would come back but it would be a good long while because we are having to start from the bottom all over again.
That’s the part you seem to not be getting. We are talking a process that would take YEARS to get done, if it would even happen at all.