George Will dismantles latest 'radical' MAGA scheme

Conservative columnist George Will at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland (Christopher Halloran/Shutterstock.com)

Frustrated by European allies' response to his war with Iran, U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening to withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) altogether.

Many Trump critics, in response, are saying that Congress needs to play a role in handling U.S. involvement with NATO — and that Trump, under the U.S. Constitution, doesn't have the authority to pull the U.S. out of that alliance by himself without Congress' input. And some of Trump's MAGA allies are using the Unitary Executive Theory, a far-right legal doctrine, to argue that the president alone has the right to decide what the U.S. does in NATO.

Conservative Washington Post columnist George Will tackles this controversy in his May 1 column, laying out some flaws with the Unitary Executive Theory.

"The 'Unitary Executive Theory' is an idea percolating in America's political and judicial debates," the Never Trump conservative, now 84, explains. "Its radicalism includes insistence that the president may unilaterally withdraw the nation from treaties to which the Senate has consented. Withdrawal from NATO has become topical because of the current president's long-standing animosity toward the alliance. This has intensified because some NATO members have been uncooperative concerning the Iran war, about which they were barely consulted."

Will continues, "Put aside the wisdom of leaving NATO — history's most successful instrument of collective security — during the largest European war since NATO was created in 1949. But consider the ramifications of this additional marginalization of Congress: postulating an inherent presidential power to withdraw from even the most consequential treaties."

The conservative columnist makes a clear distinction between "relations" and "obligations" where foreign policy is concerned.

"Presidents may unilaterally extend recognition to foreign governments, thereby establishing relations," Will notes. "Treaties, however, establish U.S. obligations. The president's primacy in foreign policy does not entail the power to exclude Congress from involvement in implementing or renouncing these obligations. Supporters of the Unitary Executive Theory argue that the vesting of executive power in the president means a presidential monopoly of all power connected in any way to executive duties."

Will continues, "John Yoo, law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, brings to his advocacy of the Unitary Executive Theory learning that is proportionate to his tenacity…. Yoo says leaving NATO 'would certainly be a foreign-policy disaster.” But his theory insists that the Constitution relegates Congress to the role of spectator at the disaster. When a theory drags its adherents into such an intellectual cul-de-sac, the theory should be relegated to the ranks of ideas that need to be reconsidered."

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