President Donald Trump has long criticized the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, frequently bellyaching that the international military partnership has been “very unfair” to the United States, and castigating American allies as deadbeats for, in his eyes, failing to pull their weight. However, it appears Trump’s attacks on NATO are more than bluster. Citing senior administration officials, The New York Times reported late Monday that at several points in 2018, Trump discussed withdrawing the U.S. from the international organization, a move that would effectively doom the 29-nation alliance and empower Russia, which has spent years seeking to weaken it.

“It would destroy 70-plus years of painstaking work across multiple administrations, Republican and Democratic, to create perhaps the most powerful and advantageous alliance in history,” Michèle A. Flournoy, an under secretary of defense under Barack Obama, told the Times. “And it would be the wildest success that Vladimir Putin could dream of.”

To some extent, the news isn’t all that surprising. Trump has never hid his disdain for international partnerships, and has maintained rocky relationships with critical American allies, whom he constantly accuses of taking advantage of the U.S. During his presidential campaign, he described NATO in particular as “obsolete,” and admonished member nations in his two appearances before the alliance. “NATO members must finally contribute their fair share and meet their financial obligations,” Trump told the group in 2017. “This is not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States. And many of these nations owe massive amounts of money from past years and not paying in those past years.”

Still, the revelation that Trump wanted to leave the alliance entirely—which neither the president nor the White House has denied—is jarring. For seven decades, the partnership has been a critical bulwark against Russia—and Moscow has long hoped to see it unravel. A U.S. pullout would, without question, be a gift to Putin. Senior administration officials, including former secretary of defense Jim Mattis and National Security Adviser John Bolton, reportedly worked to maintain the allyship after the president first told aides that “he did not see the point of the military alliance.” Other national security officials have continued “internal and highly sensitive efforts to preserve the military alliance,” the Times reported.

Of course, a great deal of damage has already been done. Trump’s tumultuous appearance at NATO last July bruised relationships with top allies as he clashed with leaders and threatened to leave the organization if they didn’t capitulate to him. “He obviously has come to this meeting with the intention of dividing the alliance and in creating a negative story he appeared to have no interest in creating a positive outcome,” former U.S. ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns told my colleague Abigail Tracy at the time. “Every president since Truman has thought of himself as the leader of the NATO alliance. Trump obviously doesn’t.”

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