Rubio NATO post from 2023 goes viral after Trump threats

A more than 2-year-old social media post by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in which he asserted that U.S. presidents should not be able to unilaterally pull out of NATO resurfaced Wednesday after President Trump said he would reconsider U.S. membership in the alliance once the conflict with Iran ends.

“No U.S. President should be able to withdraw from NATO without Senate approval,” Rubio, then a Florida senator, wrote in a December 2023 post on social platform X.

Rubio was responding at the time to the Senate passage of a bill he sponsored to prevent any president from withdrawing from the longstanding alliance without congressional approval.

The Florida lawmaker cast the measure, included as a provision in the annual National Defense Authorization Act, at the time as a critical tool for congressional oversight.

“We must ensure we are protecting our national interests and protecting the security of our democratic allies,” he said in a separate statement.

Rubio’s 2023 post quickly began making the rounds Wednesday on X, following suggestions from himself and Trump that the U.S. would reexamine its relationship with NATO amid escalating tensions with European allies. The post had 2.3 million views on X by Wednesday afternoon.

“I can promise this: The Senate will not vote to leave NATO and abandon our allies just because Trump is upset they wouldn’t go along with his reckless war of choice,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote on X.

“Thank you to @SecRubio for sponsoring the bill in 2023 requiring a two thirds vote of the Senate to make sure clueless presidents couldn’t act on a whim,” Schumer added.

The secretary of State reflected on his previous stance on NATO during a Fox News appearance Tuesday, saying he once found “great value” in the transatlantic alliance because it allowed the U.S. to “project power into different parts of the world” when national security was threatened.

But Rubio argued that NATO may now be becoming more of a “one-way street,” referring to several world leaders’ reluctance to join or cooperate with the U.S. military operation against Tehran.

Some countries, including Italy and Spain, have blocked the use of their bases for U.S. aircraft involved in the military operation, and others, including Spain and France, have reportedly restricted airspace.

“You have to ask that question: Why do we have billions and billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars, over the years trillions of dollars, and all these American forces stationed in the region if we can only use them, we can — when in our time of need, we’re not going to be allowed to use those bases?” Rubio told Sean Hannity.

The unwillingness of European allies to send warships to help secure safe passage for oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz has frustrated Trump, who has slammed NATO as “cowards” and a “paper tiger.”

“I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin knows that too, by the way,” Trump said in an interview with The Telegraph published Wednesday.

The renewed threats come after Rubio told CBS News in 2024 that he did not have Trump in mind when he authored the 2023 measure, saying he did not believe Trump would remove the U.S. from NATO.

“I do think he’s going to do, admittedly in an unorthodox way, what every American president has done since the onset of NATO and that is demand that some NATO countries do more,” he said.