ATL Bear said:
bubbadog said:
ATL Bear said:
At an issue level, no one should disagree with the POTUS on this. It's better for the US, it's even better long term for our allies, and it actually strengthens NATO overall. As it seems with everything having to do with this POTUS, it ends up being an argument over style and approach. I'm okay with some public ridicule and pressure as years of the diplomatic slow play hasn't been effective. I'd rather he be direct (even if uncomfortable) in a face to face situation than tweet out a bunch of shots across the bow.
And nobody really disagrees at an issue level, as far as I can tell. Trump isn't breaking new ground here; getting NATO allies to pay their share is a continuation of the policy of previous administrations.
Trump's style is loud, bullying diplomacy over quieter diplomacy. Sometimes there is a place for louder diplomacy.
But I think it's a mistake to dismiss this as merely a difference in style. At some point, the line between Trump's style and Trump's policies become very blurred. Here's what I mean. If Trump had simply been cajoling NATO members to increase their contributions, that would be one thing. But he goes way beyond that. He disparages the entire concept of NATO, to the point that the Europeans seriously believed he would not honor America's commitment to defend NATO members. He disparages the European Union, which makes allies nervous because NATO is also a union of mostly European states. He attacks our allies at levels that go beyond their NATO contributions. He says Russia is a competitor, not an adversary, which doesn't give the Baltic states (Estonia in particular) much confidence that the US will look out for them if Putin behaves aggressively (remember that the Russians already have launched a crippling cyber attack on Estonia). Trump may in his own mind view all these statements as nothing more than leverage to get NATO members to ramp up their defense spending, but these are all statements that have a bearing on US policy, or at least reflect the "thinking" of the administration that Trump leads, and that's why his "style" has broader implications.
Besides, as others have pointed out on this thread, the 2% commitment was for 2024 and, thus, none of the nations that aren't there yet are actually out of compliance. So when Trump claims they're deadbeats, he's lying, and our allies naturally resent being lied about in public.
And why would anyone trust Trump's figures anyway? This guy admits he lied about Canadian tariffs when he met Trudeau and just pulled figures out of his ass. Apparently, he doesn't understand or doesn't care that this admission of deliberate lying will affect his relations with every other ally.
Again, most of what you're citing is style not substance, feelings not actions. That is projecting what we "think" would happen based upon simple framing of sporadic dialogue and snippets. I can tell you most of our NATO allies don't view Russia as much an adversary as we are choosing to do. I also believe, even prior to Trump, that the NATO alliance needed to be rethought. Even Obama agreed with that. Obama also carried the "weak" moniker because NATO allies knew he would press them to take the lead on many NATO operations (Libya being one example). I believe that he didn't deserve that moniker for that particular approach.
The contribution levels have been consistently resisted and pushed back. The costs we bare regarding use of our bases and operations centers, intelligence, equipment, and manpower via NATO which is the reality of the claim of how much people ride our tails for defense. It's a huge percentage, like about 3/4's. But the interesting part is we're talking whether these nations have met minimums, meanwhile the US has been contributing much more than is required under NATO terms, which has allowed other countries to not put forth anything comparable. That should be rectified, and if that's not a deadbeat, it's certainly a leech as they take advantage of the largess of another.
Again, pressuring on payments has been a matter of style differences (which is not to say that those differences aren't important).
Questioning the value of the NATO alliance (Trump, remember, called it obsolete and wouldn't commit to mutual defense until events forced him to do so) is an issue that effects policy.
Obviously, some NATO countries perceive a level of threat from Russian differently than others. For Spain and Portugal, the threat is remote. For Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and even Poland, it's existential. The Iberian Peninsula isn't really in Russia's sphere of interest, The Scandinavian Peninsula is. Russia is not behaving like a competitor when its jets and submarines show up in Sweden's territory. It's behaving like an adversary. It's how Russia is behaving toward every NATO country in which it has either a material interest or an interest in intervening in politics to try to splinter NATO or the EU.
I agree that NATO needed (past tense) to be re-thought. I go back to the end of the Cold War. Somebody with as much international experience as George HW Bush should have understood as well as anyone Russia's historic paranoia and its fear of Western Europe. Russia's hostile reaction to NATO expansion to its borders was predictable (it was the same reaction Ronald Reagan had to Russian influence in Nicaragua, "just hours from South Texas" even though it was several borders removed from the Rio Grande). Instead, we brought the former Warsaw Pact and SSRs into our protective sphere. A more imaginative approach -- one that I can see Ronald Reagan proposing -- was a structure that either allowed Russia to join NATO or the creation of a separate non-aggression agreement signed by Russia and NATO members. Instead, we kept Russia outside the tent, and the result were predictable.
But that's all past tense. It's neither here nor there now. We have to deal with the legacy of that earlier failure, but it's not something we can undo. Russia after communism did not have to become an adversary, but they're one now, and we have to deal with them on that basis. This doesn't mean we don't have common interests we can build on wherever possible. It also doesn't mean we publicly treat our allies like dog**** while our president metaphorically fellates the Russian dictator who is diametrically opposed to western democratic values.
