Donald Trump’s criticisms of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are winning positive attention from analysts who argue the military alliance should be getting more scrutiny from Washington.
“When Trump talks about NATO being obsolete, it is dismissed as crazy rhetoric,” said Job Henning, a defense analyst who recently wrote a piece advocating for broad reform of the alliance. “But he is actually asking questions that are pretty similar to what a lot of people have been asking.
Trump made headlines over the weekend by questioning NATO’s relevance and arguing its members aren’t paying their fair share. The comments came just before NATO officials arrived in Washington for meetings with President Obama and the Pentagon.
“Either they pay up, including for past deficiencies, or they have to get out. And if it breaks up NATO, it breaks up NATO,” Trump said Saturday in an interview with The Washington Post.
The Trump comments were aimed at NATO members who have repeatedly failed to meet the target of spending 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense. Only five of the 28 members — the U.S., the United Kingdom, Greece, Estonia and Poland — now meet the standard.
Plenty of people beyond Trump see a problem with those figures.
More @ The Hill
I have questioned the ongoing existence of NATO, since it is highly unlikely that Russia will send waves of tanks en masse through the Fulda Gap. There is no need to send in armies to invade the former Western European nations, as they are self-destructing, quite nicely on their own. So in my opinion, NATO is now a solution in search of a problem. And it did the one thing it should NEVER have done; expanding and including the former Warsaw Pact nations. What mal-educated, out of touch with reality politician(s) and or generals thought, it would be a brilliant idea to station NATO troops in countries that share a border with Russia? NATO is something whose time has come and gone.
ReplyDeleteNATO is something whose time has come and gone.
DeleteYes and long since.