https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-12-2024
"Today’s big story continues to be Trump’s statement that he “would encourage
[Russia] to do whatever the hell they want” to countries that are part of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) if those countries are, in his words,
“delinquent.” Both Democrats and Republicans have stood firm behind NATO since
Dwight D. Eisenhower ran for president in 1952 to put down the isolationist
wing of the Republican Party, and won.
National security specialist Tom Nichols of
The Atlantic expressed starkly
just what this means: “The leader of one of America’s two major political
parties has just signaled to the Kremlin that if elected, he would not only
refuse to defend Europe, but he would gladly support Vladimir Putin during
World War III and even encourage him to do as he pleases to America’s allies.”
Former NATO supreme commander Wesley Clark called Trump’s comments
“treasonous.”
To be clear, Trump’s beef with NATO has nothing to do with money. Trump has
always misrepresented NATO as a sort of protection racket, but as Nick Paton
Walsh of CNN put it today: “NATO is not an alliance based on dues: it is the
largest military bloc in history, formed to face down the Soviet threat, based
on the collective defense that an attack on one is an attack on all—a principle
enshrined in Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty.”
On April 4, 1949, the United States and eleven other nations in North America
and Europe came together to sign the original NATO declaration. It established
a military alliance that guaranteed collective security because all of the
member states agreed to defend each other against an attack by a third party.
At the time, their main concern was resisting Soviet aggression, but with the
fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin, NATO
resisted Russian aggression instead.
Article 5 of the treaty requires every nation to come to the aid of any one of
them if it is attacked militarily. That article has been invoked only once:
after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, after which
NATO-led troops went to Afghanistan.
In 2006, NATO members agreed to commit at least 2% of their gross domestic
product (GDP, a measure of national production) to their own defense spending
in order to make sure that NATO remained ready for combat. The economic crash
of 2007–2008 meant a number of governments did not meet this commitment, and in
2014, allies pledged to do so. Although most still do not invest 2% of their
GDP in their militaries, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea
in 2014 motivated countries to speed up that investment.
On the day NATO went into effect, President Harry S. Truman said, “If there is
anything inevitable in the future, it is the will of the people of the world
for freedom and for peace.” In the years since 1949, his observation seems to
have proven correct. NATO now has 31 member nations.
Crucially, NATO acts not only as a response to attack, but also as a deterrent,
and its strength has always been backstopped by the military strength of the
U.S., including its nuclear weapons. Trump has repeatedly attacked NATO and
said he would take the U.S. out of it in a second term, alarming Congress
enough that last year it put into the National Defense Authorization Act a
measure prohibiting any president from leaving NATO without the approval of two
thirds of the Senate or a congressional law."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
