Trump Stops NATO from Making a Terrible Mistake

President Donald J. Trump meets with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg during a one on one meeting Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2019, at Winfield House in London. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

At National Review, Conrad Black explains President Trump’s success in steering NATO away from the failed policies of previous presidents. He writes (abridged):

It has been a challenge to define a new role for NATO. Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush allowed NATO to degenerate into “an alliance of the willing,” which in practice meant that the so-called allies would cheerfully accept having their security assured by the United States. President Obama proclaimed “a pivot to Asia,” but it got only as far as withdrawing American forces from Europe, not deploying them elsewhere. (what a disaster of a president Obama was).

President Trump recognizes that pushing Turkey into the arms of Russia, and Russia into the arms of China, would be terrible mistakes.

As the NATO meeting takes place, another, more vivid success of Trump’s foreign policy can be seen in the tumult and upheavals in Iran. Where the Obama administration appeased Iran while cold-shouldering Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, giving the ayatollahs a green light to deploy nuclear weapons in ten years, Trump is squeezing Iran with sanctions so severe that the regime is shaking.

The ayatollahs are enriching fissile material to try to frighten France, Germany, and the U.K. into demanding that the U.S. lift sanctions. That isn’t working. They aren’t really agitating, Trump won’t do it, and if the ayatollahs get close to a deliverable nuclear weapon, the United States will take it down with air strikes and the Iranian government will collapse — the Iranian people will cheer such a strike. That will crush the windpipe of the Hezbollah (Lebanon), Hamas (Gaza), and Houthi (Yemen) terrorists, making peace possible in the Middle East, and will not go unnoticed in Pyongyang.

Not much can be said before these events occur, but the increasing military strength of NATO, and the deterioration of terrorism-sponsoring despotism in Iran, are important achievements of this administration and will be undeniably visible as such by Election Day.