And another thing Trump doesn't mention:
- The U.S. has bases all over Western Europe that, were we not part of NATO, we would either have to pay for or we'd simply not have them, thus not have a presence in a place where our adversaries could start a war and/or annex our allies' nations.
Furthermore, Trump is flat-out incoherent in his remarks. To wit, what Trump is obsessing over like a man trying to fish a nickel out of a deep and muddy storm drain is that back in 2014 NATO members issued a nonbonding call for each country to bump up defense spending to about 2 percent of its national GDP. This was a simple and un-nuanced way to suggest each nation pull its own weight; in practice, it’s been difficult for small countries to ramp up military spending so dramatically because they have little infrastructure to spend it on (see: Iceland) and because few countries are willing to burn enormous heaps of money via the United States-preferred cash-furnaces of nuclear aircraft carriers and the world’s most expensive fighter jets.
While slow going, the call to boost spending has been effective; most nations have indeed been increasing their military budgets—and a large reason for that is Russian military aggression. The NATO alliance was formed in the first place as a counter to Soviet military aggressions in Europe; Putin’s unsubtle ambitions to retake old Soviet-held territory in the name of a new greater Russia, and especially the Russian military invasion and occupation of Crimea, have instilled a new sense of urgency in European nations now facing a new and substantive military threat from the Russian kleptocracy.
That’s right: NATO is urging members to spend more money in large part to combat Russian aggression. If you explained to Donald Trump that the primary reason NATO members have been seeking to dramatically increase defense spending is to protect themselves from Putin’s Russia, however, he would likely look at you in a stupor. The man knows that NATO should be spending more money to build up their military—but he doesn’t have the foggiest idea why. The man is, we repeat, a f–king idiot. He is a screen door without the screen; he is a scooped-out pumpkin rotting on a porch long after Halloween has passed.
Indeed, while Trump burps out his One Remembered Talking Point on NATO, that everybody should be spending more money (he still appears to believe NATO members owe this money to the United States, which is not even close to being true unless one presumes that Trump expects every nation to purchase new F-35 military jets from America in order to make up the difference, which he might), the biggest news in the lead-up to the NATO summit has been Trump’s threats to pull the United States out of NATO entirely—an effort to unravel the alliance that just happens to coincide with one of the Russian government’s own most long-sought ambitions.
Which is it? Do NATO members need to spend vastly more money in order to counter new military aggressions from Putin’s government, or are those and other world aggressions so inconsequential that NATO is no longer needed at all? Don’t ask tantrum-boy, he doesn’t have the slightest idea what he’s even arguing for. At no point has Trump been able to coherently explain what NATO is or why the United States belongs to it in the first place; as usual, he continues to treat the presidency as one of his cheap private business endeavors, imagining it can only count as successful if Donald Trump is personally screwing every other entity he comes into contact with for whatever pocket change they can toss his direction.
