Let me emphasize what Donald just said.
I know, you already heard all about it, but pause for a moment, take a deep cleansing breath, and consider it again, thinking not just about how monumentally stupid and irresponsible it was, but what sort of geopolitical earthquake it might just have precipitated. Trump just said that he has such contempt for our European allies that he couldn’t care less whether they get invaded by Putin’s Russia. He would, in fact, tell Vlad to have at it, and do any damned thing he pleased. As far as he’s concerned, the NATO alliance means exactly Jack/shit. Article 5? This, Article 5. The goddam Brie-slurping pantywaists are on their own.
How do you suppose that reverberates throughout the ranks of our friends and foes alike?
O.K., now let’s discuss the breathtakingly moronic underpinnings of Donald’s hissy fit.
Remember when Donald thought he was being clever by slapping tariffs on Chinese imports? He thought that the Chinese were paying those tariffs. He’s so fantastically stupid that he thought billions and billions in Chinese cash were flowing directly from Asia into the US treasury, as if the tariffs were a tax on China. No matter how many people tried to explain it to him, he never once understood that it’s the importers who pay the tariffs, that is, Americans. He’s bragged ever since about how much money he milked out of the hapless Chinese, and because his followers are just as stunned as he is, this is what MAGA Nation thinks actually happened.
Well, His Trumpiness has the same sort of fundamentally clueless misconception about the commitments made by NATO members to attain certain levels of defence spending.
For many years now, going back as far as I can remember, the Americans have been urging other NATO nations to spend more on defence. There was a brief lull in the moral suasion following the end of the Cold War, but the harsh realities of international relations soon reimposed themselves, and the campaign to get everybody to pitch in more money promptly resumed. It went on all through the Bush and Obama administrations. It wasn’t so much a question of Europeans paying their fair share as it was a reflection of America’s anxiety that its global military commitments left its armed forces in a precariously stretched position should major war break out in Europe. Moreover, as NATO expanded, so did its defensive perimeter, and conventional military deterrence needed to be strengthened on that score too. To this end, eventually, a pledge to increase defence spending to a modest 2% of GDP was extracted from all the alliance members. This is a pledge that has, often as not, been honoured only in the breach (though in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this has begun to change).
Donald, who never much cared for NATO anyway, somehow got wind of the failure of many European nations to meet their 2% pledge, and to him, this meant they owed the alliance – and maybe even the United States directly – the shortfall. He thinks the failure to spend as much as promised means they have unpaid bills. He seems actually to believe that they’re in arrears, with the debt piling up year after year (think of the compound interest alone!). And, since NATO is to Donald nothing more than a protection racket, the failure of the Europeans to make timely payments of the principal + vig means no protection for them. Why should the U.S. provide the service when the delinquents aren’t paying for it? That’s no way to run a mafia, boy, believe me.
That’s how confoundingly, frighteningly, brain-roastingly, dumb-as-a-sack-of-hammers idiotic Trump is, and always has been.
By the way, you’ll note he talks about informing America’s aghast allies of his views on the matter by way of one of his “sir stories”, which means he’s making the whole thing up.
The consequences of Trump’s express Putin-worshiping hatred of NATO.
We’re already witnessing what looks like an American abandonment of embattled Ukraine, all because citizen Trump, incredibly, is pulling the GOP’s strings in Congress. This on its own is enough to largely destroy confidence in American resolve and alliance commitments all over the world. If nothing changes on this front – as I write this, there remains some hope that Ukraine will still get the US support it needs – the ramifications for the present teetering world order will almost certainly be grave.
Yet this might be nothing next to the brute fact that a leading candidate for President of the United States, an infantile, cretinous, insurrectionist traitor who nevertheless might well find himself back in the Oval Office come 2025, maybe for good, just said that he means to leave America’s allies to their fate. Just that he said it out loud – no matter what happens in the coming election – is enough to send shock waves around the globe, and to have knock-on effects that could, before long, amount to a major geopolitical realignment in which the relative power of the democratic West is dramatically eroded. It doesn’t even matter if Trump gets himself elected next November. Any nation that could nominate such a man for high office can never again be the indispensable keystone of anybody’s national security arrangements. Maybe Trump gets whupped this time, maybe he winds up in jail, or even drops dead on the campaign trail; it makes no difference. His mere existence as a credible candidate for the top slot means something has gone terribly wrong with America, and everybody in the world is now either required, or indeed champing at the bit, to begin planning for a new reality in which the United States is neither an ally to be trusted nor an enemy to be feared.
It pains me greatly to acknowledge this sad new reality. America’s current (and soon to be former?) allies need to start thinking right now about what’s going to change, and what they’re going to do about it. That includes we here in Canada, who may soon be sharing a ridiculously long border with an increasingly hostile great power that abhors our social-democratic ways, and craves our resources.
What this will mean in Europe, on the Korean Peninsula, in the South China Sea, in the Persian Gulf, Pacific, Taiwan, here at home, everywhere, may be beyond even my darkest imaginings. Autocrats all over, realizing that they now live in a world in which their might makes right, could be emboldened to make any number of dangerous and destructive moves. This is the world Trump is giving us, just by running his ugly little sphincter of a mouth.
It’s dreadful.
Meanwhile, diaper-wearing-and-stinking-of-excrement Donald keeps on romping his way to the nomination, pretending to be a strong man, rather than the pathetically spineless little boy he actually is, and nobody in the Republican Party is saying anything.
It remains astonishing to me that so-called conservative Americans don’t understand that their own nation is by far the largest beneficiary of the global system of alliances, organizations, treaties, and institutions that have upheld the world geopolitical order for the past eight decades. “America First!” they bray like drug-addled donkeys. Well, you frickin’ morons, yes, that was always the idea. You think Harry Truman, George Marshall, George Kennan, Dean Acheson et al. were trying to put America second? You think they had no idea how to make the post-war world more amenable to Western, liberal-democratic values? Look around, chowderheads. The international status quo was engineered by giants to make it all work to the infinite advantage of thoughtless little pipsqueaks like you, and if you manage to make good on your imbecilic idea that America will be better off on its own, without friends and allies in every potential theatre of action all over the globe, you’ll find out soon enough which way is up.
If only we didn’t all have pay for your abject foolishness.
the needlefish 