Guardian - On the heels of a visibly awkward visit from the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, Donald Trump said that Germany owed “vast sums of money” to Nato and the US, even though the alliance does not stipulate payments to America.
His remarks prompted a former US permanent representative to Nato to reply “that’s not how Nato works”, and to add that increased European spending on defense was not a “favor (or payment) to the US”.
Trump’s tweets on Saturday suggested a misunderstanding of the way Nato is funded. According to Nato’s official guidelines, member nations are expected to spend at least 2% of their country’s gross domestic product on defense. However, only a handful of the 28 members actually meet that target.
2 comments:
Noone should understand NATO. If you honor the declaration of independence and constitution and UN charter you get suspicious of continental military alliances that lock in standing armies. This is the world war model inherited from the German empire. If you just woke up after sleeping since 1943 you would not be living in the same nation, now you are in the homeland of an empire. Nationalism has always questioned entanglement with the British Empire and asked how good of an ally of indepenence can Russia be. From Adams to Lincoln to FDR to post- missile crisis JFK. Now Putin after his famous UN speech is the major proponent of the independent nation state as globally conjoined in the UN. The US, as announced in Obama's UN speech, is the opponent of national independence. NATO formalizes the world war model of imperial axis powers.
In Putin's UN speech he condoned military alliances against fascism or currently against ISIS. This is distinct from the standing empire of the US to which the UN is a footnote. This part of Putin's message puts him on the US enemies list. Trump unlikely has any clue why Putin likes the UN. Perhaps Trump will someday summon the courage to talk with Putin in the next four years even while being held hostage by the US imperial guard as he now is. Trump may fear personal trouble if he were to thaw our relations with Russia and with some reason after what happened to JFK and Nixon. Trump is not going to put himself personally on the line and acquiesces in the face of a threat. Perhaps why Putin, now Trump's enemy, has moved on to threatening military escalation. In Putin's UN speech it became apparent that if ISIS has been a US ally then the US is the enemy of national sovereignty and effective peacekeeping.
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