Trump Set To Turn NATO Into The Trump Steaks Of Diplomatic Alliances
Trump Set To Turn NATO Into The Trump Steaks Of Diplomatic Alliances
Again with this crap.
Hey, nice little international alliance of democratic nations standing as a bulwark against authoritarianism you got there. Be a shame if something happened to it.
Yes, it is time for another entry in America’s long-running mob drama “Donald Trump treats NATO like it’s a North End grocer,” now in its ninth year. (You can find previous episodes here, here, and here. Oh and also here. And here. And don’t forget here.) In this latest episode, the former president told our European allies they better cough up the weekly vig, or he’ll send his enforcer Vladimir “The Hump” Putin over to bust some kneecaps with a baseball bat or a few divisions of mechanized infantry.
Trump made his latest threats during a rally in South Carolina on Saturday:
“One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’ I said, ‘You didn’t pay. You’re delinquent.’ He said, ‘Yes, let’s say that happened.’ No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.”
Sigh. First, once again, we must explain to Peach Pinochet that NATO is not a protection racket where other nations pay America to make sure no hoodlums throw a Molotov cocktail through the store window. Instead, every member nation has agreed to put two percent of its GDP towards military spending in the off-chance the alliance feels it must, say – oh, let’s pull a crazy scenario out of our tuchus – help a smaller country resist an invasion by a psychopath who wants to restore a long-dead empire.
Now, some nations have been falling short of that two percent goal for years, and American presidents have tried to get those nations to uphold their commitments, with varying degrees of success. There is no financial “delinquency” here, no unpaid bill that America has been sending to the prime minister of Norway. Annoyingly, Donald Trump, with his half-century business career mostly consisting of piling on debt and then stiffing the banks and then countersuing the banks when they sue him to collect, only sees it through that frame. This despite a near-decade of career military and diplomats and government officials explaining to him how he’s got it wrong.
And as always, Trump’s ignorance is freaking out our European allies:
Some European policymakers said that Trump’s rhetoric was a security threat to the continent. A senior German lawmaker who was a top foreign policy lieutenant of Chancellor Angela Merkel wrote that Europe needed to get ready to stand on its own.
“Everyone should watch this video from Trump and then understand that Europe may soon have no choice but to defend itself,” Norbert Röttgen wrote on his Facebook page. “We have to manage this because anything else would be surrender and self-abandonment!”
For 80 years, Europe has found itself standing between idiot totalitarians on one side and the democratic United States on the other with NATO as a sort of fail-safe to keep the former in check. But its leaders now feel as if they might be stuck between two idiot totalitarians, which a couple of thousand years of pre-NATO history tell it is not a stable situation.
For their part, former Trump officials are saying (mostly anonymously, of course) that the conversation with the leader of a “big country” never happened, and is yet one more example of Trump making shit up to entertain his audience of slack-jawed knucklefucks. Which is cold comfort in Berlin or Oslo.
Meanwhile, Republican officials who absolutely know better and who would be currently barreling at light-speed toward Alpha Centauri if a Democratic president had been this cavalier about international relations, are instead brushing it off as Trump being Trump, as if that’s not the problem:
“He told the story about how he used leverage to get people to step up to the plate and become more active in NATO,” [Marco] Rubio said on “State of the Union,” rationalizing and sanitizing Mr. Trump’s comments as just a more colorful version of what other U.S. presidents have done in urging NATO members to spend more on their own defense. “I have zero concern, because he’s been president before. I know exactly what he has done and will do with the NATO alliance. But there has to be an alliance. It’s not America’s defense with a bunch of small junior partners.”
What Trump has done with the NATO alliance is threaten to leave it about a gazillion times. What he “will do” with it if he’s elected in November is right there on his website:
Finally, we have to finish the process we began under my Administration of fundamentally reevaluating NATO's purpose and NATO's mission. Our foreign policy establishment keeps trying to pull the world into conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia based on the lie that Russia represents our greatest threat.
Yr Wonkette is not an international expert by any stretch, but we do think the nation currently busy destabilizing Europe and several dozen of our allies is not a threat to be played down.
Meanwhile, after nine years of this, major media still describes Trump’s NATO incoherence as such:
Several NATO partnership experts described Trump’s understanding of the financial obligations of NATO member countries as inaccurate and argued that his opposition to collective security as a member nation is misplaced.
“Inaccurate!” “Misplaced!” Maybe it’s time for some stronger language and framing here. “Donald Trump is a dangerous fucking moron who wrecks our diplomatic relations with allies harder than he wrecks his own marriages” would really convey the urgency, with the added benefit of being true.
[WaPo / New York Times / WaPo]
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Trump is basically pandering to the anti-Nato crowd of his base. It's an unsurprising outcome.
I completely overlooked Trump murdering irony (again) with his “you have to pay your bills.” LOL. And then my head exploded.