WASHINGTON: Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that the United States \u201cis going to have to reexamine\u201d its relationship with NATO once the war against Iran has concluded.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there\u2019s no doubt, unfortunately, after this conflict is concluded, we are going to have to reexamine that relationship. We\u2019re going to have to reexamine the value of NATO in that alliance for our country,\u201d Rubio said to host Sean Hannity on Fox News.<\/p>\n
He added that \u201cultimately\u201d it would be a decision for President Donald Trump to make.<\/p>\n
The top US diplomat said he had been \u201cone of the strongest defenders of NATO\u201d while he was in the US Senate because he \u201cfound great value in it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Much of that value was in having military bases in Europe that allowed the US military \u201cto project power into different parts of the world,\u201d Rubio said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf now we have reached a point where the NATO alliance means that we can\u2019t use those bases, that in fact we can no longer use those bases to defend America\u2019s interests, then NATO is a one-way street,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Rubio went further, saying that while Washington was not asking NATO allies to conduct airstrikes as part of the war against Iran, \u201cwhen we need them to allow us to use their military bases, their answer is \u2018No?\u2019 Then why are we in NATO? You have to ask that question.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rubio\u2019s comments come after several European countries have restricted the US military from using bases on their soil.<\/p>\n
Earlier on Tuesday, it was revealed that Italy had denied a US aircraft permission to land while it was en route to the Middle East for a combat mission.<\/p>\n
And on Monday, Spain closed its airspace to US planes carrying out missions against Iran.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that the United States \u201cis going to have to reexamine\u201d its relationship with NATO once the war against Iran has concluded. \u201cI think there\u2019s no doubt, unfortunately, after this conflict is concluded, we are going to have to reexamine that relationship. We\u2019re going to have to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":95728,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95718"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95730,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95718\/revisions\/95730"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}