Donald Trump suggested putting the world’s strongest military alliance “to the test” in his latest social media posting that could have grave consequences.
The U.S. President has long criticized the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which also includes 30 European allies and Canada, over his belief that other members don’t pay their fair share.
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“Maybe we should have put NATO to the test: Invoked Article 5, and forced NATO to come here and protect our Southern Border from further Invasions of Illegal Immigrants, thus freeing up large numbers of Border Patrol Agents for other tasks,” Trump posted on Truth Social Thursday night.
Article 5 refers to NATO’s mutual defense clause, which states that an “armed attack” on one member is considered an attack on all 32 member-states.
NATO says it assesses on a case-by-case basis what triggers Article 5—such as the “invasion by one state of the territory of another state”—but clarifies that “events that lack an international element, such as purely domestic acts of terrorism, do not trigger” the mutual defense clause, even though member states may choose to assist.
In the alliance’s nearly-80-year history, the mutual defense clause has only been invoked once: on the day after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and the U.S.’s NATO allies then backed the American response in Afghanistan, where more than 1,000 non-American NATO soldiers were ultimately killed.
Trump’s latest Truth Social post comes amid his ongoing threat to pull the U.S. out of the alliance.
“We’ve never needed them—we have never really asked anything of them,” the President told Fox Business on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland on Thursday. “You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan or this or that, and they did: they stayed a little back, little off the front lines.”
The day before, Trump, in his meandering speech in Davos, blasted NATO’s seeming unreliability: “I know them all very well. I’m not sure that they’d be there. I know we’d be there for them. I don’t know that they’d be there for us.”
Trump particularly criticized NATO ally Denmark, as he campaigns to bring Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, under U.S. control. He called the Nordic country “ungrateful” after falsely claiming that the U.S. “gave” Greenland back to Denmark after American forces defended it during World War II.
But Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general, pushed back Wednesday to assert that NATO did help the U.S. in Afghanistan.
“For every two Americans who paid the ultimate price,” Rutte said, “there was one soldier from another NATO country who did not come back to his family—from the Netherlands, from Denmark, particularly from other countries.”
Denmark actually suffered the highest per capita deaths among the military coalition members in the Afghanistan conflict: military casualty tracker iCasualties.org lists 43 Danish soldiers killed.
“You are not absolutely sure that the Europeans would come to the rescue of the U.S. if you will be attacked,” Rutte told Trump. “Let me tell you, they will.”
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