Senators renew effort to bar future US withdrawal from Nato

The effort has support from top Republican and Democratic senators on the upper chamber’s foreign relations committee

A bipartisan group of US senators is pushing for legislation that would prevent any US president from pulling America out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation without approval from the upper chamber.

The proposed joint resolution, which would need to pass both the House and Senate and gain President Joe Biden’s signature to have the force of law, is the latest effort by legislators to head off the possibility that a future president would yank the US out of the transatlantic defensive alliance it became a founding member of in the years following the end of the Second World War.

Previous efforts to bar US presidents from exiting the Nato alliance by decree have been introduced in previous Congresses, but none have managed to get past the upper chamber thanks to the 60-vote de facto threshold for legislation created by the Senate’s filibuster rule.

Like a nearly identical bill introduced in the 117th Congress and approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the resolution states that the US chief executive “shall not suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty, done at Washington, DC, April 4, 1949” without “the advice and consent of the Senate, provided that two-thirds of the Senators present concur or pursuant to an Act of Congress”.

This resolution, which was first reported by Reuters, is sponsored by Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat, and Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. Both are members of the Senate’s Foreign Relations panel.

Similar measures have been introduced in the last few Congresses, but the effort to bar a presidentially-ordered Nato pullout took on added urgency during Donald Trump’s tumultuous four-year term.

The former president, who is currently seeking his party’s nomination in the 2024 election despite multiple criminal cases against him, has expressed a desire to withdraw the US from the alliance, which has taken on outsized importance in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Mr Biden, who has long been a strong supporter of America’s role in the soon-to-be 32-member bloc, has made restoring US alliances in the wake of Mr Trump’s presidency a priority of his administration, and has overseen efforts to expand Nato with the addition of Finland and the imminent addition of Sweden to the alliance.

Yet despite the strong support for Nato from both parties, a minority of Republicans remain aligned with Mr Trump and have expressed a willingness to support him or a future GOP president should that person choose to end America’s participation in the defensive pact.

Asked about that possibility during a press conference in Helsinki on Thursday and pressed on how he’d assure Finns that America would remain a reliable Nato ally, Mr Biden replied: “I absolutely guarantee it. There is no question”.

“There’s overwhelming support from the American people. There’s overwhelming support from the members of the Congress, both House and Senate, in both parties,” he said.

Mr Biden said the US and her Nato allies would continue to “stand together” because “the American people have known since the end of World War Two” that “unanimity among European and transatlantic partners” is “the best bet anyone could make” for global security.

“We will stay connected to Nato, connected to Nato, beginning, middle, and end,” he added.