On January 7, US president Donald Trump promised to withdraw the US from 35 international organizations and 31 UN agencies:
The Memorandum orders all Executive Departments and Agencies to cease participating in and funding 35 non-United Nations (UN) organizations and 31 UN entities that operate contrary to U.S. national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty.
Unverified: then the White House deleted the announcement from their website (personal note: I did receive 404 on it for a while).
Correction: announcement is still up or has reappeared. An archived copy is also available in case they change their mind.
It’s voluntary yes but the US isn’t just the largest member but it’s baked into the system the US is in charge.
Think it like the situation with Amazon Web Services. When it shut down it took out roughly 2/3 of the websites with it. Essentially for all intents and purposes the core of the internet was gone and that had a nasty ripple effect.
That’s obstinately what would happen if the US was removed from NATO.
Oh, okay. AWS is actually a good analogy. It’s a huge pillar of the existing infrastructure, and if it was gone it would be a pretty huge, unprecedented crisis. The internet would still come back, though. (Since I’m on all alt platforms already, I actually didn’t notice it was down until I saw it on the news!)
Similarly, NATO would be in a bind, but I have every reason to think the considerable power and common interests of the remaining parties would see it through. One big question I’ve seen mentioned is the American officers that staff parts of it. Either they could keep working there even if the US is not a member, which is possible, or there would be just be a period of interruption to it’s coordination functions while the ranks are refilled. Since Britain and France are nuclear powers, just article 5 is a strong protection already, though.
Yes it would come back but it would be a good long while because we are having to start from the bottom all over again.
That’s the part you seem to not be getting. We are talking a process that would take YEARS to get done, if it would even happen at all.