Trump Stands by His Criticism of ‘Obsolete’ NATO
24th March 2016
If nothing else, Trump has the virtue of being willing to raise questions that can profitably be raised but which more ‘grown up’ candidates just wouldn’t think to do.
In Twitter posts on Thursday morning, the Republican presidential front-runner called the 67-year-old security organization “obsolete” and complained that the U.S. pays a “disproportionate share” of its cost.
This is an excellent point that ought to be under ongoing discussion but Just Isn’t. There is no more monolithic aggressively expansionist Communist Soviet empire, which is the precise danger that NATO was crafted to resist. The nature and future of NATO, starting with a de novo review of whether it is even needed, ought to have taken place under Bush the Younger, but didn’t. (Democrats, of course, have no objection to the U.S. meddling in other countries’ business, so long as it’s done in furtherance of the ‘progressive’ agenda — South Africa, si! Zimbabwe, no!)
Absent the Soviet menace, NATO is exactly the type of entangling foreign alliance that George Washington so wisely warned against. It allowed the Europeans to cut their military budgets to the bone and grossly expand their spending on social services, with results as you see them. I think it’s high time that we cut them loose and say, ‘Hey, you worried about Russia? Spend your own money.’