Brave Sir Lindsey Graham Runs Away
Danger reared its ugly head, he bravely turned his tail and fled ...
A member of the United States Senate has to work very, very hard to be the most craven shitheel in the chamber at any given moment. God bless Lindsey Graham’s dedication to putting in the work at all times.
Graham has famously been one of the more hawkish members of the Senate for a couple of decades now. Seriously, the man has never seen a situation at which he didn’t want to throw American soldiers, and he has never seen an American troop withdrawal from anywhere that he didn’t think was going to result eventually in America being overrun by Islamic jihadists or Somalian pirates or the Shining Path or something.
So it’s pretty hilarious that he’s pivoted rather suddenly to badmouthing NATO and threatening European security because a Creamsicle-colored reality show host told him to. Did we say hilarious? We meant, as they say in his native South Carolina, bless his heart.
On Sunday’s “Face the Nation,” Robert Costa asked Graham about Donald Trump’s worldview, expressed again last week to much gnashing of teeth, that NATO is some sort of protection racket that needs to start giving America its taste. And if they don’t, Trump will tell Russia it can do “whatever the hell it wants” to our European allies.
Specifically, Costa asked, “Is that appropriate in terms of U.S. foreign policy?” The old Lindsey Graham, the one who would probably still have half the American military stationed in Iraq if he could, would have said that with Russia bleeding Ukraine dry and seeing its first military successes there since the first couple months of the war, that this is a dire situation, the stability of Europe is at stake, and we should be giving the Ukrainians whatever they need to fight Vladimir Putin’s soldiers.
And when we say the old Lindsey Graham, we mean the guy who as recently as a week ago was admitting on the Senate floor that Ukraine badly needs the aid even as he voted against the aid package for them, because Donald Trump doesn’t like it so what are you gonna do.
Graham was even more forceful with Costa on Sunday:
“So here’s what I think: they should pay up. Nineteen of 31 NATO nations do not contribute two percent of their GDP. I want to have a system where if you don’t pay, you get kicked out. But no, I’m not inviting Russia to invade Ukraine. President Trump is right to want NATO nations to meet their obligation of two percent. We need to turn it into an obligation that means something … there’s 70, 80 billion dollars left on the table. If you’re in NATO, pay the two percent.”
He sounds like us yelling at The Stupidest Man on the Internet to PAY THE FUCK UP back in the day. (He still hasn’t, by the way, and he’s racking up the interest.)
In theory, we’re not opposed to members of a military alliance shouldering a fair share of the cost burden, though we’ll also note that not every nation can have the rah-rah chest-thumping kill-them-all-and-let-God-sort-them-out militarism as part of its national character like the United States does, which is one reason why we spend more on our military, in raw dollar terms, than the next nine countries combined.
But as Lindsey Graham well knows, now is not the fucking time. Vladimir Putin already invaded Ukraine partly because he figured NATO wouldn’t care. Then NATO surprised him by caring and sending Ukraine enough weaponry to hold off Russia for two years and counting, during which the Ukrainian military has managed to destroy enormous numbers of Russian equipment and soldiers. Graham himself has long preached that helping Ukraine has been a great investment for American security.
Putin’s likely counting on us losing interest at some point, especially if Trump, God help us all, gets re-elected in November. So maybe NATO could take care of this emergency now, and get the cost-sharing disagreement (which as Graham noted has been going on since at least the early 1980s) sorted out later?
(Over the weekend, Denmark, which is a member of NATO, announced it will donate to Ukraine its entire inventory of artillery shells, because apparently Denmark understands the seriousness of the situation.)
By the way, that desperately needed aid package Graham voted against also included the border security measures that Republicans have been frothing at the mouth to get in place for years, but have publicly announced they are opposed to because Trump doesn’t want to give Joe Biden any sort of victory before November. (Conveniently ignoring the fact that for a good chunk of Democratic voters, that border bill was no victory of any sort.) This is the same border the GOP keeps screaming is a national security issue.
So to suck up to Orange Julius, Lindsey Graham by his own standards is helping America shoot itself in the foot on two separate significant national security issues. It’s pretty much par for the course for Graham, who never met a principle he wouldn’t discard if doing so would get him access to the powerful, or at least a tee time at Trump Doral.
Yr Wonkette is not funded by the United States military.
96.25 on my first Financial Accounting exam!
The whole "pay up," "contribute 2%" is a rampant misunderstanding, exploited by Trump.
NATO's entire total budget is $3.9 Billion. That's a lot of money, but the US Pentagon budget alone is what, $850 Billion? If you count all the departments that contribute to the US military, it's close to $1.5 Trillion (the VA, the alphabet-soup agencies, DOE for the nukes, State Department, slush funds like the "NGO"s that fund covert operations, etc.).
The 2% thing is that NATO members are supposed to spend 2% of their GDP on their own military. The US really wants them to spend that money buying weapons from US corporations. Most of them are not doing that, because they face no military threats that justify anywhere near that level of waste.
The other members of NATO see this as a US shakedown, and it's hard to argue with them.
With the Ukraine situation, it's getting complicated. NATO members have "sold" most of their active weapons, and their reserves, and their spare parts, to Ukraine already. It's a mix-and-match of systems and equipment that don't work, don't work with each other, require different training; and of course there are the spare parts. Those countries are largely out of weapons now.
The US can't manufacture this stuff fast enough to replace it. Not even close. We're out of stuff. That's the reason provided that we "sold" the Ukrainians cluster munition artillery shells; we're out of the regular kind. Our materiel is so complicated and so expensive we can't replace our own, either.
This is a factor in the naval standoff with the Houthis. The Houthis spend a few thousand bucks on drones and home-made rockets. The US Navy shoots them down with missiles at $5 Million a pop. And there are only so many missiles on a US Navy vessel, and they're running out and most can't be resupplied at sea. The Houthis know this, and are counting our bullets like Clint Eastwood in "Dirty Harry."
The EU can see where this is going. I strongly suspect Sweden and Finland were hot to join not so they could get in on being looted by US arms manufacturers. I think they expect the US to pull out of NATO, which would then become the EU's military wing. That, they're interested in.
Trump and Lindsay Graham can keep squawking about 2% to NATO (a lie) and get away with it because most Americans don't pay any attention.
It's standard End-Of-Empire bullshit. It takes up a couple paragraphs in a history book, but it's scary and inconvenient to live through in real time.