Donald Trump and his Republican minions are playing with nuclear fire on NATO and Russia NATO opponents are like the anti-vaccine movement. They see no need for something that has kept them safe in ways they do not understand. It's madness.

Tom Nichols | Opinion columnist

At least once this year, the House of Representatives agreed on something important. In a massive and lopsided vote, Democrats and most Republicans joined to vote 357-22 to make it harder for President Donald Trump to pull the United States from NATO.

The 22 opponents, however, were all Republicans, mostly from the ironically-named “Freedom Caucus.” Meanwhile, over in the Senate, a Republican majority chose to support Trump’s efforts to lift sanctions on a Russian oligarch, with only 11 GOP senators objecting.

This is what the party of Ronald Reagan, the party that so often claims to have won the Cold War, has been reduced to in the name of defending Donald Trump. In the mirror-world of American politics, Democrats are now the party willing to oppose the Kremlin, with a liberal speaker of the House from San Francisco more likely to stare down Moscow than a Republican president.

This is all madness. NATO prevented the Cold War from becoming World War III, one of the great diplomatic achievements of any age. Nuclear war, a fear that was the daily companion of multiple generations of North Americans and Europeans, seems now to be a distant threat from a bygone era.

Read more commentary:

All signs point the same way: Putin has compromising information on Donald Trump

Russia isn't out to decide our elections, they want to divide us and damage our country

House Democrats might need to impeach Donald Trump whether they want to or not

Today, the Russians are testing the limits of the post-Cold War order, seeking to dominate their neighbors, redrawing the boundaries of Europe by force, and trying to drive a wedge between the North Americans and the European family of which we have been a part since our founding as a republic. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats — contradicting Trump's more benign view of the Russians — told the Senate this week that every NATO member feels under threat from Russian interference. NATO’s mission is now more relevant than at any time since the 1980s.

Why, then, are Trump and his Republican minions so hostile to NATO?

Bashing NATO wins points with Putin, GOP

For President Trump, the answer probably lies in his nearly obsessive fear of the Kremlin, and particularly of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump’s knowledge of foreign affairs is minuscule and his curiosity about it is even smaller. And yet, the president seems to have internalized the Russian narrative on an array of complex issues; he even has thoughts, amazingly enough, on Montenegro.

We cannot know what Putin has said to Trump, but we must assume it has never involved kind words for NATO, which Putin hates with all the vodka-and-sausages Soviet nostalgia one expects from an aging KGB officer. Much of the president’s animus toward NATO is part of his overall disdain for international institutions whose functions he does not comprehend. But we must also assume that his specific targeting of the Alliance is part of his overall attempt to court the goodwill of the current master of the Kremlin.

There is also political hay to be made in the GOP by trashing NATO. Like Trump himself, Americans who oppose membership in NATO have become the political equivalent of the anti-vaccine movement. They see no need for something that has kept them safe in ways they do not understand, and revel in their obstinacy as a reflexive and childish assertion of autonomy.

Trump's base believes Russia is their friend

This is particularly strong among the most ignorant strata of Trump’s base who stubbornly believe that Russia is a defender of traditional (read: white and Christian) values, and who see Russia as the enemy of the people they hate the most, notably Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Recall that Trump won the Republican nomination while exhorting Russia to conduct espionage against his opponent, without a peep from a fair number of the Republican faithful who to this day think Russian spying is less of a problem than FBI investigations into Russian spying.

Republicans in Congress are harder to explain, because they’re supposed to know better. It is possible that there are members of Congress who do not understand NATO, what it did, or what it does, or the threat posed by Russia. But that cannot possibly include Mitt Romney, who ran for president in 2012 warning of Russia as our top geopolitical foe, yet as a senator caved to Trump’s demand to lift sanctions.

In the House, Republicans from the most GOP-heavy districts are likely playing NATO as just another plot by the “elites” to steal cash from hard-working Americans and give it to lazy Danes and Greeks and Poles.

There is a more alarming possibility, however. Some Republicans might be dismissing any talk about the Russians in order to shore up support among the GOP base who will be needed to weather the storm likely to break when Special Counsel Robert Mueller issues his final report — which is coming soon, according to Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker.

Trump and GOP are playing with nuclear fire

Along with their footmen in the conservative media, the goal could be to soften the view of the Russians, smear organizations like NATO as a waste of time and money, and then dismiss all criticism of collusion and Kremlin espionage as just another Deep State plot meant to keep working-class Americans under the thumb of U.S. and European elites who exercise their control of global events through fronts like alliances and treaties.

This is playing with fire — nuclear fire, even. What holds an alliance together is willpower and commitment. Money buys weapons, but it cannot buy resolve. If America’s enemies think that we and our allies have walked away from each other, and that we will not come to our mutual defense, we will be challenged not only by the Russians, but by anyone else who thinks that we can be defeated in pieces. Even talking about it the way the president and the Republicans are doing is already inflicting serious damage and risk on global security.

And for what? For the political fortunes of one man who surrounded himself with a grimy coterie of operators and charlatans who got in over their heads in a game that was more serious than they realized?

The next president will have to put the salvaging and restoration of the Alliance at the top of his or her agenda for immediate repair, before disaster strikes.

Tom Nichols, a national security professor at the Naval War College and the Harvard Extension School and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, is a Russia expert and author of "The Death of Expertise." The views expressed here are solely his own. Follow him on Twitter: @RadioFreeTom