Yes, President Trump Can Withdraw from NATO

By John Yoo

Friday, April 17, 2026

 

The Iran war has had the unintended consequence of undermining the West’s preeminent postwar alliance. Disappointed by the refusal of European allies to assist the United States, the Trump administration is floating the possibility of exiting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Critics argue that the president cannot terminate a treaty on his own. But the Constitution is clear: Presidents can indeed unilaterally end U.S. participation in international agreements. If Donald Trump wants to tear up the NATO treaty, he can just do it. And in June, the Supreme Court may even provide implicit support for such an exercise of presidential power.

 

Just because Trump can take such action, however, doesn’t mean he should.

 

President Trump has grounds for questioning the loyalty of our European allies. Europeans can claim, correctly, that the Iran war does not fall within the geographic scope of the NATO treaty, just as with the Iraq war. Nevertheless, the United States could reasonably expect support against an Iranian enemy, motivated by religious fundamentalism, that can strike European capitals with ballistic missiles and choke off their oil imports from the Persian Gulf.

 

But instead of supporting the United States to some degree, Spain barred U.S. military aircraft from its bases and airspace. France denied launching rights for U.S. warplanes bound for Iran and overflight permission for U.S. supply planes bound for Israel; the United Kingdom refused to allow the U.S. to conduct “offensive” operations from bases within British territory; and Italy barred U.S. bombers from landing at its Sigonella airbase in Sicily. While other European nations have quietly assisted, as NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte made clear in Washington, D.C., meetings last week, none have agreed to participate in operations to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or protect civilian shipping.

 

Such European resistance sparked predictable outbursts from President Trump. The president told Reuters that he was “absolutely” considering withdrawal from NATO. He also declared that he could withdraw the United States from the alliance on his own authority: “I don’t need Congress for that decision . . . I can make that decision myself.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, once a strong supporter of the transatlantic alliance, raised similar doubts about NATO’s future. “If NATO is just about us defending Europe if they’re attacked, but them denying us basing rights when we need them, that’s not a very good arrangement,” Rubio told Al Jazeera.

 

Sensing a fight that could give them a political advantage, Democrats respond that the law bars any president from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer took to X to promise that the Senate “will not vote to leave NATO and abandon our allies.” They point to the 2023 law, passed by bipartisan majorities and signed by President Biden, which forbids “suspending, terminating, denouncing, or withdrawing the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty” without the advice and consent of two-thirds of the Senate or an act of Congress.

 

These members of Congress have strong policy reasons to support NATO. Withdrawal from NATO is not only unpopular; it would also inflict a grievous blow to U.S. foreign policy and national security. For almost 80 years, NATO has kept the peace in Europe, deterring the Russians, reintegrating Germany into the West, and shielding Western Europe as it rebuilt after World War II. It provides the United States with critical bases to project military power throughout the world. It has helped build a loose coalition of nations that share a commitment to upholding democratic government, free-market economies, and the values of Western civilization. It is the most successful alliance in modern history.

 

But under our Constitution, good policy does not necessarily align with the allocation of power. In this case, the Constitution’s text, structure, and history all support Trump’s argument that the president can unilaterally terminate a treaty. The Supreme Court’s upcoming decision in Trump v. Slaughter, which is expected to uphold a president’s right to fire the heads of independent agencies, will lend powerful support for the president’s right to terminate treaties as well. So, however misguided the decision might be, Trump has the constitutional authority to terminate the NATO treaty.

 

The president’s right to terminate treaties begins with the location of the treaty power in the Constitution. Article II, Section 2 declares that the president “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.” The Framers did not place the treaty power in Article II by accident. Article II begins with a general grant: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.” Compare Article I, which grants Congress only the legislative powers “herein granted” — limiting the legislature to those powers specifically enumerated. Article II contains no such limitation. As Justice Scalia famously observed in his dissent in Morrison v. Olson, which erroneously upheld the constitutionality of the independent counsel law, this text and structure indicates that the president, by default, enjoys all of the executive power of the federal government. Article II’s vesting clause, Scalia wrote, “does not mean some of the executive power, but all of the executive power.”

 

Under Britain’s unwritten constitution, the king exercised the treaty power because it was, as Blackstone concluded, an executive power. Even John Locke, who suggested that foreign affairs might fall under something he called “the federative” power, observed that the executive was nonetheless best suited to exercise it. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress exercised the treaty power, but that was because, as Alexander Hamilton observed in The Federalist Papers, Congress did not exercise any legislative powers. The Congress of the Articles of Confederation instead assumed the executive power of the national government. When the Framers included the treaty power in Article II, they sought to continue, rather than disrupt, this traditional Anglo-American understanding of treaties as acts of the executive.

 

If Article II had simply remained silent as to treaties, we would have inferred that Article II’s vesting clause granted that power to the president alone. But Article II instead includes the Senate as a party to treatymaking, which stands as the best argument for Trump’s critics. The Senate’s participation in the treaty process, however, does not transform the treaty power into a legislative power. The Senate’s role in advising and consenting to appointments, for example, does not turn officers of the United States into creatures of the legislature. The Framers clearly understood the difference between the legislative power and the executive power. The former included the authority to make rules governing the private conduct of citizens. The executive power, by contrast, includes “the protection of the community against foreign attacks” and “the steady administration of the laws,” as Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 70. The Framers embodied this understanding in the clear allocations of power between Articles I and II. Reading the treaty power as just another species of legislative authority would violate that basic separation of powers.

 

The Constitution only addresses the making of treaties, not their unmaking. Inclusion of the Senate’s advice and consent function in Article II’s Treaty Clause, therefore, only creates a limited exception to the general grant of executive power to the president. The Constitution only provides for the participation of the Senate in making the treaty; therefore, everything else regarding international agreements defaults to the president. The president alone initiates the treaty process, conducts negotiations, and makes the resulting agreement after Senate consent. Unlike with legislation, where Congress can override a presidential veto, the Senate has no power to force the president to accept a treaty that he opposes. The president wields an absolute veto over treaty creation — a power with no analog in the legislative process. It would make little sense to read the Constitution as granting the president unchecked authority to prevent a treaty from coming into existence yet denying him the power to end one.

 

Hamilton made exactly this argument when the Washington administration confronted its first diplomatic crisis: the French Revolution. France sent a new ambassador, Edmond Genêt, who demanded that the United States come to the assistance of the revolutionary government under the terms of the 1778 Treaty of Alliance, which the U.S. had used to great effect in winning independence. President Washington, however, declared that the U.S. would remain neutral and interpreted the 1778 Treaty not to require it to assist France in its wars against the other European powers. Like Trump’s critics today, James Madison (at Thomas Jefferson’s urging) argued under the pseudonym “Helvidius” that the Constitution reserved the setting of foreign policy and the interpretation of treaties in Congress. Hamilton responded under the pen name of “Pacificus” (though it seems most everyone knew who he was) that the power of diplomatic relations, treaty interpretation, and foreign policy remained wholly executive. Article II, he wrote, was “intended to specify and regulate the principal articles implied in the definition of Executive Power; leaving the rest to flow from the general grant of that power.” The Supreme Court has long agreed with Hamilton: In United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp. (1936), the Court held that the president is the nation’s “sole organ” in foreign affairs, the only constitutional actor who can “speak or listen as a representative of the nation” in dealing with other countries.

 

The reason that the Supreme Court might lend support to Trump’s arguments is that this same logic applies to the hiring and firing of executive officers. Just as the Constitution is silent on treaty termination, it also has no provision for the removal of officers of the United States. This is no mistake: The Appointments Clause follows immediately after the Treaty Clause in Article II. Just as the Constitution explicitly requires the Senate’s participation in treaty making but not treaty breaking, so too does it require the Senate to advise and consent to the appointment of principal officers but not to their removal. Article II’s silence therefore vests the president with the unilateral authority to remove all executive branch officers.

 

The reason why is clear. The president alone bears the constitutional duty to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed, and he cannot fulfill that duty without the power to remove those who execute them on his behalf. The Appointments Clause even contains an explicit exception allowing Congress to vest the appointment of inferior officers in the president alone, the courts, or department heads. The Framers knew how to create exceptions to the general rule of senatorial participation when they so desired. The Treaty Clause, sitting directly adjacent, contains no comparable provision for treaty termination. If the Framers had wanted to require Senate consent for withdrawal, they knew how to say so. They simply chose not to.

 

The parallels do not end with the constitutional text. Just as the Neutrality Proclamation provides an early precedent in favor of presidents today, the first Congress recognized in 1789 that the president could remove executive officers without returning to the Senate for its consent. Just as the Supreme Court agreed with Hamilton’s approach in Curtiss-Wright, so too in Myers v. United States (1926) did it uphold the president’s power to fire all executive officers unilaterally. While Humphrey’s Executor and Morrison v. Olson seemed to allow Congress to protect certain independent agencies and government officers such as the Federal Trade Commission or the special counsel, the Roberts Court has steadily removed these barriers to direct presidential control. In Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in December over whether Trump could fire a Federal Trade Commissioner whom Congress had protected from removal except for cause. If the Roberts Court upholds Trump’s decision, as it is expected to, it will adopt for removal the very same rule of interpretation of the executive power that Trump can deploy toward treaty termination.

 

Critics may object on the grounds of formal symmetry: The same process that creates a law should be required to undo it. The only way that Congress can repeal a statute is through a new statute. But this argument leads to a conclusion virtually no one accepts — that presidents cannot terminate treaties at all, and that any withdrawal requires the consent of two-thirds of the Senate. If the symmetry argument were correct, the Taiwan defense treaty, the ABM Treaty, and dozens of other agreements would be effectively irrevocable without a Senate supermajority. Historical practice has never followed this rule; in fact, the first termination of a treaty — that of the 1778 Treaty with France — occurred through a simple act of Congress during the first Adams administration. Although the U.S. has terminated treaties on relatively few occasions, half of them have occurred through unilateral presidential action. Presidents Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Carter, and Reagan all terminated treaties on their own. President George W. Bush’s December 2001 declaration of the United States’ withdrawal from the ABM Treaty without congressional or senatorial consent is another prominent example.

 

Because the federal courts have refused to adjudicate the merits of any dispute between the president and Senate over treaties, termination remains, “as a practical matter,” in the words of the Congressional Research Service, a power in the president’s hands. The most relevant precedent is President Carter’s termination of the Mutual Defense Treaty with Taiwan in 1979 — a treaty that, like NATO’s Article 5, committed the U.S. to the military defense of a foreign government. Senator Goldwater challenged the termination in court, arguing that the president could not withdraw from a defense treaty without Senate consent. The D.C. Circuit upheld Carter’s authority. The Supreme Court refused to overturn Carter’s decision, but a majority did not comment on the merits of Goldwater’s claim. Four justices concluded that the dispute was a political question unfit for judicial decision because it involved “a treaty commitment to use military force in the defense of a foreign government.” That is a precise description of NATO. The federal judiciary’s consistent refusal to intervene in these disputes confirms that the power rests with the president.

 

None of this leaves Congress powerless, but its tools are political, not legal. The Framers designed a system in which the president’s control over foreign affairs would be counterbalanced by Congress’s control over spending and domestic law. Congress can refuse to appropriate funds for NATO commitments. It can decline to authorize military deployments in support of allied nations. It can condition defense spending on continued alliance membership. It can leverage its role in approving future treaties. During the fight over the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative, congressional Democrats conditioned Defense Department appropriations on continued compliance with the ABM Treaty. Congress knows how to use its ample constitutional weapons to influence foreign policy.

 

But one tool unavailable to Congress is to strip the president of a constitutional power — and the 2023 law is not the first time it has tried. In 1988, the Senate attached a condition to the INF Treaty purporting to freeze treaty interpretation to the Senate’s understanding at the time of ratification. The Reagan administration called the condition an unconstitutional infringement on the president’s foreign affairs power but ratified the treaty with the condition attached — and then largely ignored it. In 1995, Congress enacted a provision declaring that the U.S. would not be bound by any agreement substantially modifying the ABM Treaty unless it went through the Article II treaty process. The Clinton administration continued to conduct anti-missile defense policy as it saw fit. In neither case did the statute actually constrain presidential action. The 2023 NATO provision follows the same pattern. Just as Congress cannot use a statute to require Senate consent for the removal of a cabinet officer — a restriction the Supreme Court has struck down repeatedly — it cannot use a statute to require Senate consent for treaty termination. Such a law may express Congress’s policy preferences, but it cannot override the president’s Article II authority.

 

The debate over NATO withdrawal is a policy dispute, not a legal one. Reasonable people can disagree about the wisdom of remaining in the alliance. But the Constitution does not leave the question of who decides in doubt: The treaty power is executive. The Framers placed the Treaty Clause and the Appointments Clause side by side in Article II, Section 2, subjecting both to the same senatorial check at the moment of creation, but not at the moment of destruction. Just as the president may unilaterally remove officers appointed with Senate consent, so too can he terminate treaties approved the same way. Presidents from Washington to Bush have exercised that right while the courts have declined to interfere.

 

Congressional Democrats are free to argue that leaving NATO would be a mistake and to use every legislative tool at their disposal to prevent it. But when they claim that the law bars the president from withdrawing, they confuse a statute with the Constitution. If Trump decides to withdraw from NATO, it would certainly be a foreign-policy disaster for the United States. But even though it would be terrible policy, Congress cannot deny to the president a power that the Constitution vests squarely in him.