Thomas Massie and Mike Lee advocate for US to dump NATO
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Sen. Mike Lee are advocating for the U.S. to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organiation (NATO).
"If you could snap your fingers and get us out of NATO today, would you?" Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, asked in a post on X.
"Yes," Massie replied.
The House lawmaker has previously called the alliance — which includes the U.S. and scads of other nations — a "Cold War relic."
"I would withdraw us from NATO," Massie said, the Washington Post reported in 2022. "It's a Cold War relic. Our involvement should have ceased when the [Berlin] wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed."
Lee has been critical of the NATO alliance, describing it as a "great deal for Europe," but a "raw deal for America."
The senator has called for the U.S. to consider departing NATO, and has in some cases explicitly endorsed the prospect of a U.S. withdrawal.
"NATO members must pay up now," Lee asserted in a tweet. "If they don't—and maybe even if they do—the U.S. should seriously consider leaving NATO," he continued. "We won the Cold War," the senator noted. "A long time ago, in fact."
"Amen!" Lee exclaimed in a tweet when responding to someone who had declared, "Let's leave NATO."
"Let's go!" the lawmaker wrote in response to two separate posts suggesting that President Donald Trump should withdraw the U.S. from NATO.
Part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024, which was signed by President Joe Biden in late 2023, placed into U.S. law language that declares, "The President shall not suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty, done at Washington, DC, April 4, 1949, except by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, provided that two-thirds of the Senators present concur, or pursuant to an Act of Congress."
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