After last week’s NATO summit in Brussels, the world is reeling over the fate of the transatlantic alliance. In a private session at the summit, President Donald Trump is reported to have threatened to leave NATO if allies do not spend more on defense. Meanwhile, at a NATO expert forum next door, European and Canadian leaders ― and even two U.S. senators ― talked up the strength of the U.S. commitment to NATO.

Despite that outward optimism, Trump has been consistently skeptical about the utility of multilateral institutions like NATO, the European Union and the United Nations. Just this weekend, Trump described the EU as “a foe,” fueling concern that the United States is becoming increasingly isolationist and that he may pull the U.S. out of the same Atlantic treaty organization that it helped to found about 70 years ago. Given all this, it’s worth considering what the world would look like without NATO as we know it.

Simply put, withdrawing from NATO would make the world less safe. It would likely increase the risk of attacks on allies and reopen the possibility of conflict among them.

Read on, courtesy of The Huffington Post.