[ April 23, 2024 ]
President Trump is getting NATO back on track for American taxpayer. But you’d never know it from the fake news media muckrakers.
This week, world leaders are gathering in London for the 2019 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Summit, celebrating 70 years since the beginning of the historic Western alliance.
For decades, NATO members worked together to confront the world’s toughest challenges. But, the alliance’s ability to accomplish that mission became severely weakened. In 2017, when President Trump took office, only four of our NATO allies were meeting their defense spending obligations under the treaty. Meanwhile, past U.S. leaders—along with their counterparts overseas—were happy to let Americans foot the bill.
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A hallmark of the Trump Administration foreign policy is making sure America isn’t asked to be the world’s sole policeman. For NATO, that means strengthening the alliance by making clear that all members must meet their responsibilities under the agreement, which spells out that 2 percent of GDP be committed to investing in defense.
Once President Trump made his expectations clear, a funny thing happened: Today, nine members have met their targets, adding $130 billion to total defense budgets. Moreover, two-thirds of our NATO allies are on track to hit the 2 percent goal by 2024.
There’s work left to do, which is why President Trump is keeping the pressure on. The United States still accounts for nearly 70 percent of combined NATO defense spending. But under this Administration, we’ve seen the biggest improvement on that front in a generation.
“We are making real progress, most importantly on the burden sharing,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in London today. “And your leadership on defense spending is having a real impact,” he told President Trump.
“This is unprecedented. This is making NATO stronger. And it shows that this Alliance is adapting, responding when the world is changing.”
Our Man at NATO: Trump Suddenly Finds Success
By Conrad Black, Special to the Sun | December 4, 2019
As the Democrats toil to make their impeachment effort look like something other than a partisan smear job and legal scam, President Trump is at the NATO leaders’ meeting in London, observing the 70th anniversary of that organization, and is able to take some pleasure in the success of his foreign policy.
The President’s enemies, who have swarmed in the press every day since he declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination — first in derisive hilarity, then in a rising state of alarm, and finally in seething hatred — claim that he has alienated allies, swaggered absurdly, and generally brought the United States into disrepute while accomplishing nothing useful and giving comfort to the nation’s rivals and opponents.
There will be some frictions at the NATO meetings, but the president can reflect on the fact that when he assumed office, only three NATO countries of 27 apart from the United States were meeting the agreed target of devoting 2 % of GDP to defense: the United Kingdom, Poland, and mighty Estonia. Today that number is eight, and commitments are in place to take it up to 18 out of 30 within four years, a total increase in alliance defense spending of $400 billion.
It is a well-known fact that NATO is the most successful alliance in the history of the world. It was set up in urgent circumstances, when Stalin ruled all of Europe east of the Iron Curtain, from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, with over 300 divisions in the victorious Red Army, most of Europe in ruins, terrible problems of poverty and social disintegration, millions of refugees, and Communist parties supported by about a quarter of the voters in France and Italy.
The eastern border of the Western World was only about 120 miles east of the Rhine at one point. Only the nuclear preeminence of the United States deterred Stalin from moving against an almost prostrate Western Europe. The initial North Atlantic Alliance was only twelve countries, but it grew steadily, and in parallel with remarkable economic progress spurred by the Marshall Plan.
The American strategic team under President Truman, Generals Marshall and Eisenhower, and senior diplomats Dean Acheson and George Kennan devised the system of peaceful containment, which was steadily applied for more than 40 years until, suddenly, peacefully, the Soviet Union disintegrated and international Communism, as it had been known, withered. No shot was ever fired between the Western and Soviet blocs.
Other alliances have been victorious in world struggles, but not bloodlessly.
Precisely 40% of NATO’s history, 28 years, has been spent since the collapse of the threat that gave birth to it, and that survival is also a considerable achievement, because NATO has not, since 1991, been an alliance devoted to the achievement of any particular objective, as it had been to containment of the Soviet threat.
For many years the countries formerly in the USSR itself (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) and those occupied by it (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria) wanted the assurance of the principle in Article 5 of the NATO Treaty that “an attack upon one is an attack upon all,” a condition that has only once been invoked, after the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.
The following clause states that each member state can determine how it wishes to respond to the attack, but the principle has been strong cement for the alliance — everyone wants the military guarantee of the United States. President Roosevelt enunciated the pledge in his war message of December 8, 1941, following the attack at Pearl Harbor, that “we will make very certain that this form of treachery never again endangers us,” and the deterrent power of the United States has been effective against all other nations these 78 years. Only non-national terrorists have dared to initiate hostilities against the United States directly since then, and not often.
It has been a challenge to define a new role for NATO. Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush allowed NATO to degenerate into “an alliance of the willing,” which in practice meant that the so-called allies would cheerfully accept having their security assured by the United States but would not, except the British and the Poles among the larger countries, lift a finger to defend themselves or support any alliance-wide causes.
President Obama proclaimed “a pivot to Asia,” but it got only as far as withdrawing American forces from Europe, not deploying them elsewhere. Mr. Trump inherited a dispirited, underfunded, and effectively purposeless alliance, and he has at least revitalized it to a condition of Cold War strength and effectiveness. President Macron, of France, says it is “brain-dead,” but the Turkish strongman, Recep Erdogan, who is a poor ally and a dodgy character but leads a considerable military power, has replied that it is Macron who is “brain-dead,” not NATO.
President Trump recognizes that pushing Turkey into the arms of Russia, and Russia into the arms of China, would be terrible mistakes. The two greatest conceivable strategic threats to the United States are Russia aligning with China, so that tens of millions of Chinese move to Siberia and tap its resources as a concession power, paying Russia a royalty and rivaling North America as a resources treasure-house; and Turkey joining with Iran to impinge upon Israel and the Arabs, especially Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Mr. Trump had to extract the 400 American soldiers supposedly separating Turkey from Kurdish nationalists, and he could not harass Saudi Arabia grievously over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, grotesque though it was. Russian nationalism has to be encouraged to be independent of China, and Turkey has to be accommodated up to a point.
I believe NATO should be expanded to other regions (Turkey is already a long way from the North Atlantic) and should embrace all friendly countries that are at least as democratic as Turkey. Its goal should be the gradual and peaceful stabilization of the whole world.
Israel, India, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, and Australia are among the countries that would be strong additions, and Russia should not be made to feel permanently excluded, depending on its conduct. NATO’s role in developing responses to cyber-threats is progressing well and will be increasingly valuable. (Monsieur Macron’s talk about individual nations fending for themselves is a Parisian fantasy, a luxury of the unthreatened.)
As the NATO meeting takes place, another, more vivid success of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy can be seen in the tumult and upheavals in Iran. Where the Obama administration appeased Iran while cold-shouldering Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, giving the ayatollahs a green light to deploy nuclear weapons in ten years, Mr. Trump is squeezing Iran with sanctions so severe that the regime is shaking.
Efforts to blame the economic shambles caused by a 90% reduction in oil exports on America have failed, and in the past week the corrupt medieval theocracy in Tehran has killed over 500 demonstrators. No regime so unsuccessful and unpopular can fire live ammunition at its own civilians without courting a general and irresistible revolt.
When Nicolae Ceausescu ordered his security forces to kill demonstrators in Romania in 1989, they seized and summarily executed him and his terrifying wife instead. The ayatollahs are enriching fissile material to try to frighten France, Germany, and the U.K. into demanding that the United States lift sanctions.
That isn’t working. They aren’t really agitating, President Trump won’t do it, and if the ayatollahs get close to a deliverable nuclear weapon, the United States will take it down with air strikes and the Iranian government will collapse — the Iranian people will cheer such a strike. That will crush the windpipe of the Hezbollah (Lebanon), Hamas (Gaza), and Houthi (Yemen) terrorists, making peace possible in the Middle East, and will not go unnoticed in Pyongyang.
Not much can be said before these events occur, but the increasing military strength of NATO, and the deterioration of terrorism-sponsoring despotism in Iran, are important achievements of this administration and will be undeniably visible as such by Election Day.
The Truth Must be Told
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15 Comments
4 years ago
The article should have included thenames of the countries that met their obligations and those that did not.
4 years ago
Reply to
jkarna
On June 21, 1966, France made the somewhat shocking move to withdraw its troops from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
4 years ago
“It is a well-known fact that NATO is the most successful alliance in the history of the world.”
Amen to that Pam.
And it really is NATO + Israel. We can be the greatest fighting force in the history of the universe.
And we need to keep Corbyn, Sanders and Muslim Nationalists out of NATO countries.
4 years ago
Reply to
TD
ASIAN NATO.
I also propose that if North Korea does not denuke; we open up an Asian branch of NATO and add one country every time Kim Jong Un fires a missile; or mount 3+ warheads close to them everytime he launches.
ASIAN NATO: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, India, plus 2 more = Samurai 7
4 years ago
Reply to
TD
That was tried before.
SEATO was dissolved on 30 June 1977 after multiple members lost interest and withdrew after noting the USA’s failure in Korea and Vietnam.
In September of 1954, the United States, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand and Pakistan formed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, or SEATO.
4 years ago
Why didn’t we boot Turkey out of NATO as soon as Erdogan was elected? He supports Iran and Hamas and is looking for a way to drag the US into a war with Israel.
And as rapefugees start to get the vote in Britain, France, Spain, Germany, … we may soon need to dump them too.
4 years ago
Reply to
jdgalt
1. The major airbase there that we share with Turkey.
2. Tagging Russian subs with passive sonar targets as they leave the Black sea and Syria.
4 years ago
At the end of WWII, the western boundary of the Soviet Union was established as the Curzon Line with Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as “buffer states”. This was due to the fact that every successful invasion of Russia had come from their west, the Nazis in ’41, Napoleon in 1812, and another way back in the 1400s.
4 years ago
Reply to
Drew the Infidel
I think you have all that backwards. Napoleon and Hitler lost. The invasion of Russia that succeeded was the Mongols in the 13th century, who got all the way to Poland and only stopped then because their leader Ogotai Khan had died. Russia is a modern country in the sense that it didn’t exist before Ivan the Terrible.
4 years ago
Dear Pamela – Romania is one of the big winners of WW I, and was after WW II occupied by the Russians (because Churchill had betrayed the Romanians) until Stalin had pegged out – not longer.
Due to Romania’s always amazingly Nigeria-like-politicians – who do nothing without at least 30% bribe – , this little neat 150% corrupt country manages to survive in an admirable way, previously collaborating with everybody – unfortunately with the Nazis too – and now with USA.
Due to it’s position at the south eastern edge of European Union the US can reach Iran and the ME countries easily – in case that Turkey continues it’s braindead islamic way.
It’s very interesting that Romania is the single European country where multiple ethnies and races and religions are getting along without blood and thunder since more than 100 years (except of the Nazi-period)…
