Trump Right on NATO

Despite criticism from Sen. Ted Cruz, Donald Trump is wholly justified — and correct — in his calls for the U.S. to rethink its relationship with NATO, a costly and obsolete military alliance.

“We certainly can’t afford to do this anymore,” Trump said in comments to the Washington Post editorial board. “NATO is costing us a fortune,” he said. Indeed, the U.S. pays for nearly 25 percent of NATO’s over $2 billion budget.

Cruz, however, thought otherwise — temporarily exchanging his “outsider” hat for an Establishment neo-conservative one — which seemed to fit disconcertingly well.

[lz_table title=”NATO Budget Contributions per Country” source=”NATO”]
USA, 22.1%
Germany, 14.6%
France, 10.6%
UK, 9.8%
Italy, 8.4%
Canada, 6.6%
Spain, 5.7%
Turkey, 4.4%
All other nations, >4%
[/lz_table]

“It is striking that the day after Donald Trump called for weakening NATO, withdrawing from NATO, we see Brussels, where NATO is headquartered, the subject of a radical Islamic terror attack,” he said, as if the two have anything to do with one another.

Speaking to the New York Times on Friday, Trump doubled down again on his NATO criticism. “We pay far too much,” he said. “NATO is unfair, economically, to us, to the United States. Because it really helps them more so than the United States, and we pay a disproportionate share,” he explained.

[lz_third_party includes=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX8wwIASIfM”]

Trump also pointed out correctly that NATO — a mutual defense treaty designed originally to combat Soviet expansionism — is obsolete. “When NATO was formed many decades ago we were a different country,” Trump said. “There was a different threat. Soviet Union was the Soviet Union, not Russia, which was much bigger than Russia,” he said. “The world is a much different place right now.”

Indeed, NATO should have been dissolved along with the USSR — its sole raison d’être. Instead what was ostensibly a mutual defense alliance has become an aggressive, expansionist entity. This expansion is needlessly costly for the U.S. and needlessly belligerent towards Russia. NATO aggression has been a constant point of contention between Russia and the U.S., and Russia is certainly justified in her criticisms of the organization.

Following the collapse of the USSR, the West took pains to assure the former Soviets that NATO would neither expand eastward nor threaten Russian interests. “We are aware that NATO membership for a unified Germany raises complicated questions,” German Vice Chancellor Hans-Dietrich Genscher told Soviet minister of foreign affairs Eduard Shevardnadze in 1990.

“For us, however, one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east,” Genscher promised Shevardnadze. “As far as the non-expansion of NATO is concerned, this also applies in general,” he stated explicitly.

Yet here we are 16 years on — NATO has nearly doubled in size and expanded aggressively eastward, devouring 10 former Warsaw Pact countries as well as two former constituents of Yugoslavia — and Establishment figures in both parties, not to mention Ted Cruz, have the audacity to wax fearfully of Russian aggression.

Not only is the enemy against which NATO is created to guard long vanquished, the kind of war NATO is organized to fight may well be obsolete. Cruz’s claim that diminished U.S. involvement in NATO would be “a major victory” is just not supported by the facts.

“We have to be looking at terror, because terror today is the big threat,” Trump told the New York Times. “You know in the old days you’d have uniforms and you’d go to war and you’d see who your enemy was, and today we have no idea who the enemy is.”

[lz_jwplayer video=”sXaNTy75″ ads=”true”]

NATO is designed for traditional war with traditional enemies and hardly equipped for the realities of fourth-generation warfare, in which violent non-state actors muddy the division between the military and civilian. A mutual defense agreement between nation states with standing armies is about as useful as an umbrella in a flood in defeating ISIS.

Yet despite the facts Cruz claims Trump’s call “for America effectively withdrawing from NATO” is “indicative of someone who doesn’t have a basic understanding of foreign policy.”

NATO needs “to reform and refine its mission,” Mark Halperin said on MSNBC on Friday. “You have all these other politicians, including Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz, saying [Trump is] weak on defense, he’s out of touch because he wants to change NATO. I think on the politics and the policy, he’s right. NATO needs to be looked at.”