Like a criminally reckless truck driver who calls the cops on cars going a smidge over the speed limit, the American president who has done more than any other to weaken the postwar U.S.-European alliance complains endlessly about the failure of Germany, France, Britain and others to pony up their share for the common defense.
President Donald Trump is right that other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should put more skin in the game; just eight of the alliance’s 29 members are on pace to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense this year, the agreed-to target. That results in an overreliance on the American umbrella.
But the message couldn’t come from a less credible or more conflicted messenger than this commander in chief.
He has consistently minimized NATO’s importance. On the campaign trail, he called it “obsolete,” and last year he failed to affirm the treaty’s Article 5, under which an attack on one is an attack on all. It has only been invoked once: after 9/11, by the American allies who stood by our side in our darkest hour.
That Trump later begrudgingly cleaned up the mess didn’t help much; the point had been made.
He rubs raw utterly unnecessary trade disputes, treating strategic partners like economic rivals.
He closes America’s doors to refugees from war-torn Syria even as Europe struggles to absorb thousands.
And he romances Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whose life project has been to destabilize the military partnership that keeps his territorial and other ambitions in check.
Making matters worse, Trump’s haranguing of the likes of Germany is counterproductive. Western European nations are democracies.
The job of responsible leaders who seek to get voters to agree to increase spending is made many times more difficult when they seem to be doing the bidding of a bully American president with historically low approval in Europe.
In other words, Trump’s haranguing seems almost designed to backfire. It’s enough to make one think that his real goal is not to encourage more allied military spending and save NATO, but to further fray the alliance.
Putin himself couldn’t have concocted a cannier strategy.
— New York Daily News