NATO Gets an Earful of Pure Trump

Writing at The American Conservative, Pat Buchanan praises President Donald Trump for scolding NATO’s other leaders on their countries’ failure to adequately support the alliance with increased defense spending.

In Brussels, Trump praised NATO’s decision to back the U.S. war in Afghanistan after 9/11, but did not specifically recommit to Article 5, requiring all NATO nations to treat an attack on one as an attack on all, which our nervous NATO allies had wanted to hear.

Instead, they got an earful of pure Trump about how they owed back pay for NATO and that only five NATO nations were meeting their obligation to allocate 2 percent of GDP to defense.

Merkel seemed to take this as an implied threat that the U.S commitment to defend Europe from a Russia with one-tenth of NATO-Europe’s GDP may be contingent, and may have a time limit on it.

A U.S.-NATO collision could come here, and soon.