During the Vice President’s visit to Poland on Monday, Mike Pence used the venue to send a curious message to Germany.
At the meeting, Pence sharply criticized Germany for not meeting its NATO defense spending target and instead embracing the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines from Russia.
So far, the usual NATO jibes. We’ve heard it all before. But what’s this “instead”? Germany cannot pay more to NATO because it pays for energy to Russia? Of course, not. So, why say that? What is he getting at?
The “instead” is just grifterspeak, mentioned to get the mark’s attention. “You know — all that gas you need to keep from freezing to death?” That kind of remark.
Really. He continues griping about NATO spending, and again …
"It simply makes no sense for people of the United States to bear the lion's share of the burden of defending Europe … to see Germany become dependent on Russia for their energy needs is another point that President Trump will continue to raise."
Do you see it now? Was i imagining things when i questioned that “instead”?
It seems perfectly clear that the Vice President of the United States has threatened to work in concert with Russia, against Germany, to get what THEY want.
Keep in mind that “NATO spending” is, of course, code for doing business. Trump business.
Am i reading this correctly? Is that where we’re at now? Is this what we want?
Update
I wrote this far too quickly this morning and left the wrong impression, judging by many of the comments. Perhaps this really is all about Trump wanting to sell Germany its natural gas, but it seemed to me to be a veiled threat to Germany that its Achile’s heel is their reliance on Russian gas and that Trump might not be too put out were Putin to turn off the taps.
My view is that it’s really just Trump being Trump. He harangues Germany about not spending more on NATO but he doesn’t really care. Ditto the gas deal with Russia: Trump has twisted arms to get them to import US LNG but the important thing to him is to fuck with Germany. It’s the arm twisting that is really most important to him.
European leaders now worry that Trump’s illiberal aims go well beyond his insistent demands on Merkel to pay more for NATO and stop shipping so many cars to the U.S. “Many European leaders have told me that they are convinced that President Trump is determined to destroy the E.U.,” a former senior U.S. official told me. Trump has begun publicly calling the E.U. a “foe,” and promoting the resurgence of nationalism, which Macron and Merkel see as a direct threat. Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, in a recent speech at the German Marshall Fund in Brussels, attacked the United Nations, the E.U., the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and derided what he called Europe’s flawed vision of multilateralism as “an end to itself.”
...
But this was not merely about getting through to a new President. The problem, it soon became clear, ran deeper than Trump’s habitual dismissal of rational argument or ordinary differences over policy. The President, the German officials concluded, harbored a deep animus toward Germany in general, and Merkel in particular. “There’s a single-mindedness to it and almost an obsession, it seems, and this is something we are hearing from colleagues in the Administration, too: an obsession with Germany,” one of the senior German officials told me. “It seems like it’s very often issues that can seemingly be boiled down to a single number, like two per cent, or to a single concept. … He latches on to that with a certain fixation.” Niels Annen, a Bundestag member who is the German equivalent of the Deputy Secretary of State, told me, “Unfortunately, Germany seems to be very high on the agenda of the President himself.”
How Trump Made War on Angela Merkel and Europe
The New Yorker
Be that as it may, it’s possible that i did misconstrue Pence’s delivered message. But i don’t think that it’s wise to ever take them at their word. Trump is a grifter and a gangster. He knows how to deliver threats.