Hillary Clinton says Trump will pull US out of NATO if he wins in November

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has predicted that former President Donald Trump will pull the US out of NATO if he reclaims the White House later this year.

“He means what he says. People did not take him literally and seriously in 2016,” Clinton, 76, warned during a panel at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, referencing her surprise election loss to the 45th president eight years ago.

“He will do everything he can to become an absolute authoritarian leader if given the opportunity to do so,” she continued. “And he will pull us out of NATO.”

Trump, 77, kicked up a firestorm earlier this month during a rally in Conway, SC , by boasting about telling the unnamed president “of a big country” that he would not protect deadbeat NATO members who don’t uphold their defense spending obligations.

“No, I would not protect you,” Trump recounted telling the leader. “In fact, I would encourage them [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”

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Throughout his presidency, Trump openly criticized NATO members that came up short of a 2006 commitment to spending 2% of their gross domestic product on national defense.

Many members of the 31-nation bloc are ramping up defense spending in the wake of Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine.

“Donald Trump’s political rallies don’t really translate into Donald Trump’s actual policies,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) told NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday. “If you look at his policies, if you look at his record, he actually increased funding for NATO, increased the European Reassurance Initiative, and in fact for Ukraine, he was the first president to give lethal weapons to Ukraine. So I think his record is strong, and I think that’s what’s important.”

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Privately, Trump’s allies have ruminated over the possibility of divvying up NATO into two tiers — one segment that would get security guarantees under Article 5 by meeting the spending commitment, and a second cohort for those that don’t pony up the dough, Bloomberg reported last week.

Article 5 of the NATO treaty stipulates that when one member is attacked, all others in the alliance must come to its aid. It has only been invoked once, for the US after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Last year, Congress tacked on a provision to the National Defense Authorization Act restricting a president from unilaterally pulling out of NATO without a go-ahead from Congress.

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Clinton mused that such a policy wouldn’t be enough to stop Trump, suggesting he “will just not fund our obligations.”

President Biden, 81, rebuked Trump last week over his rally comments.

“The former president has sent a dangerous, and shockingly, frankly, un-American signal to the world. Just a few days ago, Trump gave an invitation to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to invade some of our NATO allies,” Biden said at the time.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg added that Trump’s comments “undermine” the defense bloc, but later expressed confidence that the US “will continue to be a committed NATO ally” regardless of the election outcome.

“The whole idea of NATO is that an attack on one ally will trigger a response from the whole alliance and as long as we stand behind that message together, we prevent any military attack on any ally,” Stoltenberg said.

Thus far, 18 of the 31 members are at or expected to hit the 2% threshold, according to Stoltenberg.

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