Trump plots 'tremendously stupid' NATO plan for his second term: report

Former President Donald Trump is pushing for a major American foreign policy change in his second administration that would likely upend decades of global national security infrastructure.

Sources tell Rolling Stone that Trump is planning to pull the United States entirely out of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance unless it caves to his demands that include one that would seem to undermine the entire purpose of the alliance.

In addition to his standard calls for other NATO countries to chip in more for their defense spending, Trump also reportedly wants to rip up the strategic doctrine that an attack on one NATO country represents an attack on all NATO countries.

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"When he was in office, Trump would repeatedly scoff at this collective-defense clause of the North Atlantic Treaty, known as Article 5," the publication writes. "One former senior administration official recalls to Rolling Stone a moment in the Oval Office in mid-2018 when the then-president started reading from a written list of smaller NATO countries, some of which he argued most Americans had never even heard of before."

Tearing up Article 5 would be a major boon for the likes of Russia, which attacked non-NATO member Ukraine in 2022 but notably has not attacked other NATO members on its border such as Estonia and Latvia.

Dr. Aaron Stein, a Black Sea Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, tells Rolling Stone that Trump's plan would be a "tremendously stupid endeavor" and added that "trading away allies based on ignorance, and Trump is ignorant about this issue, is just silly for broader U.S. national security."