BY TYLER DURDEN
SATURDAY, MAY 02, 2026 – 11:20 PM
Authored by Gregory Copley via The Epoch Times,
Western focus was, in 2026, on whether U.S. President Donald Trump would fulfill his threat to withdraw the United States from NATO. Eastern and Southern focus was on whether the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS alliance were even functioning.
In the U.S.–NATO standoff, it may take more complex political maneuvering for Trump to achieve a breakup of the alliance. Certainly, he could withdraw the U.S. military from European basing, but Congress in 2023 approved legislation that would prevent any president from withdrawing the United States from NATO without approval from the Senate or an act of Congress. The measure, spearheaded by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and, ironically, Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)—now Trump’s secretary of state—was included in the annual National Defense Authorization Act signed by President Joe Biden.
It may be more feasible for Trump to have the United States leave aspects of the military component of the North Atlantic Alliance, as French President Charles de Gaulle did in withdrawing from the NATO integrated military command structure—but not the North Atlantic Alliance—in 1967. Other members of NATO may themselves go beyond that to abandon NATO in order to form a new alliance, but that is a separate issue.
Of real, but as yet unexplored, interest is that other alliances have been forced to the sidelines because Trump initiatives, and time, have rendered them ineffective.
Among the most important of these are the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and BRICS. Secondarily, the informal Quad alliance against China—of India, the United States, Japan, and Australia—is quietly becoming less tight.
The SCO, which emerged in 2001 from the 1996 Shanghai Five security arrangement, now has 10 member states, most of which harbor suspicions about other members of the SCO. It was meant to contain a mutual security clause to require members to support other members under attack from outside. SCO membership includes Iran, and that clause has proven to be unenforceable as the wars against Iran continue. So the SCO is now effectively inoperable, except as a showcase with an expensive bureaucracy.
Source:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/alliance-fracture-now-global