During the June kickoff of the Democratic debate season, former US vice president Joe Biden, still a top choice in the 2020 presidential primary race, claimed NATO would “fall apart if he [Trump] is elected four more years”, lauding the organisation as the “single most consequential alliance in the history of the US”.

If President Donald Trump is re-elected, the 29-member North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) will be a thing of the past, former Vice President and front-runner in the 2020 presidential primary Joe Biden claimed on Tuesday night.

Biden, speaking at the Ohio Democratic presidential debate on 15 October, addressed foreign policy issues as he underscored that NATO's Article 5 states that an attack on one member is an attack on all of them.

Trump has questioned whether or not he'll "keep that sacred commitment," Biden claimed.

"If he is re-elected, I promise you, there will be no NATO. Our security will be vastly underrated, we'll be in real trouble."

The fact is, "we have an erratic, crazy president who knows not a damn thing about foreign policy," Biden continued, insisting that the president "operates out of fear for his own re-election."

Earlier this year, as the Democratic debate season started, former US Vice President and 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden said in Florida that NATO’s fate looked bleak if the current US President were re-elected:

“We know NATO will fall apart if he [Trump] is elected four more years; it's the single most consequential alliance in the history of the US,” stated Biden.

US President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticised NATO, including for the weighting of contributions to the organisation made by members.

Even before taking office, Trump challenged the alliance’s usefulness.

“I don’t mind NATO per se, but it has to be reconstituted, it has to be modernised,” Mr. Trump said in March 2016 on “Fox and Friends”.

“You know, we’re dealing with NATO from the days of the Soviet Union, which no longer exists. We need to either transition into terror or we need something else, because we have to get countries together.”

Trump has made defence spending his main talking point on NATO, as in 2018 the US President told NATO leaders they should increase their defense spending to four percent of their respective countries' economic output, double the group's current goal of two percent; he specifically lashed out at Germany, criticising it for refusing to meet the goal.