Trump's Not the Ally NATO Wants, but the One It Needs

The Donald's Unorthodox Methods Expose Failures, Rattle Elites

Former U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s threat to let lapsed NATO countries fend for themselves has exposed political elites as more incensed by populist rhetoric than by the results of their own longstanding failures. Proving that point, NATO leaders vowed to retaliate by doing what they should have been doing for 75 years: raising military spending.

They call it the “Trump containment strategy.” Trump calls it mission accomplished.

Every U.S. president since George W. Bush has engaged in ‘constructive dialogue’ over Europe’s lackluster defense spending, only to be met with promises as hollow as the barrels of the machine guns they never bought. The sophisticated economies of the West, with their GDPs bloated from peace dividends, seem inherently incapable of pulling their own weight, no matter how dark the shadows grow on their borders.

Trump’s ‘bad cop, worse cop’ routine, derided by many, is perhaps the only language the lethargic behemoth of NATO understands. My only frustration is that those words should have come from President Joe Biden. They would be even more effective, as evidenced by how welcoming NATO allies were of Obama’s reassurances about Russia back in 2012.

Trump’s unorthodox methods have previously forced issues like border security and the risks of energy dependence on Russia — and trade dependence on China — to the forefront of global dialogue. His approach, unencumbered by the niceties of diplomacy, has a way of embedding truths into the collective consciousness that, over time, even his fiercest detractors find difficult to ignore.

Smothered by the screams of outraged elites lies an undeniable truth: Trump’s doctrine, in many ways, has forced a reassessment of longstanding policies that left the West vulnerable, which decades of polite diplomacy could not.

Jens Stoltenberg, the pacifist long asleep at the helm of NATO, denounced Trump’s comments, but not a Europe that has lost the will to defend itself, having trouble keeping within the lines of NATO’s paint-by-the-numbers security strategy.

The reliance on Article 5 as Europe’s first line of defense is as misguided as it is dangerous… [Read more]