Donald Trump's bizarre speech to NATO last week was yet another opportunity for America's fact-checkers to do that thing they do, patiently explaining that even though this orange-hued fellow keeps huffing about the members of NATO owing us some cash, that is not even remotely how this works.
But Trump is really talking about indirect funding. Since 2006, each NATO member has had a guideline of spending at least 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense spending. At a 2014 summit, responding to Russian aggression in Ukraine, NATO members pledged to meet that guideline by 2024.
That's it. That's the whole story, right there. NATO members have agreed that by 2024, two presidential elections in America-years, each country would hike defense spending to 2 percent in order to boost European defenses. A few are there, and most aren't. There's no penalty if the goal isn't met. It won't affect American defense spending much, if at all, because we here in America would consider a defense budget of only 2 percent of our GDP to be an affront to our American Way Of Life and quite possibly treasonous to even propose. But the other NATO member states are, understandably, rather twitchy about Russian military aggression on their doorstep and have decided they'll be boosting their own spending as deterrent.
From this, Donald Trump has spun the fanciful tale that the members of NATO have been holding out on us, 'Merica, and seems to be under the impression that the other NATO leaders ought to be cutting us a check—and even more than that, that other NATO countries are for some reason obliged to meet the 2024 spending goals retroactively, based on his say-so, and write additional checks for each past year they haven't met the future goal.
This is self-evidently stupid. It has also become, for Donald Trump, a confusion-turned-conspiracy roughly equivalent to that surrounding Agenda 21, the nonbinding United Nations statement on sustainable development quickly made famous in certain deeply gullible conservative circles as allegedly being everything from an insidious plot to overthrow American government to a plan to overthrow civilization itself and live in mud huts alongside our favorite cattle. Whether Trump is peddling this new anti-NATO notion as "misleading" tactic to rile up his base or whether he is stone-cold stupid and honestly cannot grasp the situation is, as always, up for debate.
Trump continues to misleadingly frame the failure to meet the guideline as money owed to the United States: “This is not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States. And many of these nations owe massive amounts of money from past years and not paying in those past years,” he said at NATO, as cameras recorded puzzled or skeptical expressions on the faces of other leaders.
There was once a time when you could suppose Donald Trump was merely being misleading. All available evidence at this point suggest he is, in fact, simply incapable of grasping the rather straightforward explanation presented to him. And that’s rather key; there’s no complexity in the NATO two percent goal that a decently capable person might be tripped up on, but nonetheless his statements on NATO to the member nations of NATO have not just been misleading, but largely incoherent.
There seems little appetite even among Trump's core team to defend this particular bit of silliness. The best you will get out of them is generic nationalist mutterings about how America ought to spend more time thinking about America and less time defending other nations, but the specific premise that NATO “owes” us a large chunk of protection money, because reasons, is not something that conservatives are taking to the airwaves to nod their heads to. Everyone surrounding the man appears to just be going with the flow; yes, the sitting president is making incoherent demands of close allies based, we think, on an inability to grasp what his own briefers have told him. But all we need to do is ignore it, sit tight, and focus on the things he is not so addled on.
It's going to be interesting to see just how long that can be kept up, and just how much worse it's going to get in the meantime.