This is such a silly an short-sighted proposal.
The proponents of this view this as a transactional relationship with only two components:
- allies pay in full
- allies NATO support
What’s absent is the massive amounts of benefits the USA gets in soft political power from a united NATO block. Simply the threat of NATO defense to aggression is incredibly cost effective form of defense. Much of the USA’s power in the world is international commerce. Commerce demands stable and safe nations that are willing to spend their money. That’s the primary benefit to the world of USA’s military.
As just one example; billions of people around the world are rocking Intel, AMD, or ARM based CPUs in their computers and phones because those designs to envision them and the logistics to move them to you all exist at the consumer level. Political barriers to exporting designs and products were largely open because nations weren’t worried about their neighbor accessing this technology and using it militarily against them. This is just one small example of how the USA benefits from healthy markets derived partially because of NATO and article 5 protection.
The GOP wants to throw away all that soft power instead of using soft power to get what they want in less direct ways.
100% agreed. This whole discussion reminds me of a Perun video that goes into this in quite a bit of detail in terms of what NATO does for us both economically and militarily.
Today I thought it was worth going back to some security theory 101, this time not from the point of view of a smaller nation, but instead from the perspective of a nation like the United States. Because I would argue, there’s a pretty clear case to be made that far from being a drain on American resources, alliances like NATO are critical to the United States’ international influence and security position. … First I’m going to give a little bit of collective security 101: Why do you form alliances in the first place? And specifically, why you would still form them as a great power many times stronger than the nations you are allying with. I’m going to try and address that question both in general and also with a specific view to the US stated strategic objectives.
Of course, Putin would like to see NATO weakened, for exactly this reason, and understands exactly what kind of simple-minded bullshit to feed to Trump that Trump will then repeat and act on, to the harm of the US and the greater Western world.
Were Monty Python performing today as their heyday, they could have written the sketch:
“What has NATO every done for us?” (instead of/in addition to “What have the Romans ever done for us?”
I mean, the very fact of Trump trying to undermine NATO is itself a pretty crystal-clear indication that it must be doing something enough for our enemies to want so badly to weaken it.
It’s like when your employer pays millions of dollars to a consulting agency to make an all-out case on all fronts that your wages definitely won’t go up if you form a union, and otherwise stop it from happening. Res ipsa loquitur, as the kids say.
I would love to hang in a hood where the kids drop “res ipsa loquitur”.
I mean, the very fact of Trump trying to undermine NATO is itself a pretty crystal-clear indication that it must be doing something enough for our enemies to want so badly to weaken it.
I don’t like Trump, but attacking the messenger, in this particular case, instead of the message doesn’t inform those that may not have the perspective on the gravity of the message.
To say another way: I’m ignoring that its Trump that introduced this idea, and instead am addressing the consequences of following through with this action.
Perfectly fair. I’m just coming it at from the perspective of someone who already knows where Trump gets his ideas and priorities (which is only like 2 or 3 places, and as concerns geopolitics, exactly 1 place.)
One of Trump’s big appeals, I think, is that he presents simple solutions to complex problems.
It persuades many to say “Yeah, its common sense. I stop paying my car payment, and I get my car repo’d and I can’t drive anymore. A country that doesn’t pay for NATO bill, should get its NATO coverage dropped. Common sense! Why is Trump the first one to ‘get it’. If [I think] this is a simple solution, then the other simple solutions must also be right. Illegal crossing? Build a wall! No more crossings right? Simple fix! We need these common sense fixes that Washington doesn’t want to do because they just want to keep their jobs by not fixing anything. Trump is the man!”
This is what I think is happening and why those that support Trump believe. If there is a Trump supporter reading this, I’m interested in your response, and I would ask others not to downvote it because I’m specifically asking for it, even if I disagree with it.
I’ve talked at quite a bit of length with Trump supporters in person. I think the thing that people often miss, is that they have no idea what’s going on. A lot of them think Trump is a genius. They think it’s proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Trump won the election and Biden stole it. They think the cities are unlivable because of gang violence, like on the level of Somalia. The migrant invasion over the border, what’s really going on with Covid… the sources of news they consume are specifically designed to produce confusion and incapability to understand the world, except for certain very simple easy (and grossly untrue) messages which are sort of programmed into them. And, they accomplish that task really, really well. It’s honestly really difficult to even get a foothold talking to them, because they’re (a) totally wrong about basic facts of what’s going on and (b) incapable of critical reasoning to get themselves out of that.
Something basic like “if a source says one thing and then clearly contradicts itself later, stop listening to that source,” is alien to them. It all just gets really big and confusing and they can’t process it and they get uncomfortable. It’s a hell of a problem, and I don’t really know what the solution is, other than to make it illegal to construct deliberate propaganda and then pump it into everyone’s brains, which, trying to regulate that brings its own host of issues…
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Just after dawn on Tuesday, the Senate passed a $95 billion national security package with aid to Ukraine and Israel, setting up a showdown with the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson suggested he would not bring it up for a vote.
In a statement on Monday night in the hours before the bill passed the Senate, Mr. Johnson said the House would “continue to work its own will” on national security and border policies, which Republicans had insisted be a part of the foreign aid package, before killing a bipartisan deal to address them.
Democrats are broadly supportive of the package, as is a bloc of more mainstream and national security-minded Republicans similar to the one that helped push the legislation through the Senate.
But Senate Republicans tanked a version of the bill last week that included measures to crack down on the border, which they cast as too weak and viewed as politically inconvenient for Mr. Trump.
That prompted Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, to strip out the border measures and push through the foreign aid package on its own.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the right-wing Republican of Georgia, has threatened to bring up a motion to oust Mr. Johnson from the speakership if he puts legislation to aid to Ukraine on the floor.
The original article contains 920 words, the summary contains 221 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
