One of the great unsolved mysteries is how many current and former members of the U.S. military supported Donald Trump even as Trump pledged to stab our European allies in the back, effectively providing aid and comfort to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s military designs on the European continent.
An AP VoteCast poll of 94,000 voters found that 59% of military veterans supported Trump in the 2020 election. This is despite Trump’s oft-voiced disdain for servicemen and -women wounded or killed in action. (“Losers” and “suckers” were the precise words he reportedly chose before canceling a visit to the Aisne-Marne American cemetery in 2018 due to rain.) Not to mention his mocking disparagement of John McCain’s status as a former prisoner of war (“I like people that weren’t captured”) and his extensive, well-documented history of expressing contempt for the military, which apparently dates back to his high school days.
But despite this contemptuous insouciance toward the sacrifices made by military veterans—which might reasonably stem from his pampered background—his repudiation of America’s longstanding, ironclad commitment to the defense of Europe in the face of potential Russian aggression may strike the most discordant note of all. It represents not only a betrayal of American servicemen and -women and their mission, but a betrayal of an American national security strategy that exists—ultimately—to protect the entire U.S. population and preserve our strategic position in the world.
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Politico EU reports that in a private meeting with European Union officials held in 2020, Trump effectively guaranteed that the United States would renege on its NATO commitments if member states were attacked by Russia. As reported by Politico EU’s Eddy Wax:
One of Europe's most senior politicians recounted how former U.S. President Donald Trump privately warned that America would not come to the EU's aid if it was attacked militarily.
"You need to understand that if Europe is under attack we will never come to help you and to support you," Trump told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in 2020, according to French European Commissioner Thierry Breton, who was also present at a meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
"By the way, NATO is dead, and we will leave, we will quit NATO," Trump also said, according to Breton. "And he added, ‘and by the way, you owe me $400 billion, because you didn’t pay, you Germans, what you had to pay for defense,'" Breton said about the tense meeting, where the EU's then-trade chief Phil Hogan was also present.
As reported by Politico, President Joe Biden’s campaign responded instantly to the report:
“The idea that he would abandon our allies if he doesn’t get his way underscores what we already know to be true about Donald Trump: The only person he cares about is himself,” Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa told POLITICO in a statement.
It is perhaps unsurprising that someone utterly ignorant of U.S. history and the role American power has played in checking the encroachment of dictatorial states such as Putin’s Russia (the only country that stands any reasonable likelihood of attacking Europe) would make such statements. It’s also unsurprising that someone who may very well owe his narrow election victory in 2016 to the malign influence of Russian intelligence would make them. Trump’s admiration for Putin is as well documented as his disdain for the sacrifices of American soldiers. It’s entirely possible that his words and actions have been influenced or guided by Putin or his agents.
But it’s hard not to believe that this outburst owes more to a petulant, infantile response by Trump to the Europeans’ failure to coddle and praise him in the manner Putin certainly does. At a 2019 NATO gathering, Trump was widely mocked not only in the press but by European leaders reacting to his clueless boorishness and generally ignorant behavior. It’s not difficult to envision how this criticism might have impacted someone with such an ingrained inferiority complex that manifests itself in grandiose notions of his own personal abilities.
The problem is that affirming our nation’s strategic commitments requires someone with the personal wherewithal to convincingly articulate them in the first place, and that requires, first and foremost, the intelligence and capacity to understand them. It’s generally accepted that the international community—Putin certainly included—understands Trump as essentially a loudmouthed, mercurial buffoon (Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton suggested they mostly regard him as a “laughing fool”) with no loyalties but to his own interests. Coupled with the intelligence community’s assessment of Trump as a “giant toddler” with no appreciable ability to concentrate or pay attention, his ability to comprehend or appreciate strategic alliances such as NATO is highly suspect.
But regardless of motivation, the inescapable fact is that the type of blithe abandonment of NATO that Trump evidently espouses would cripple U.S. strategic interests worldwide. As explained by Anne Applebaum, writing for The Atlantic:
That’s because NATO’s most important source of influence is not legal or institutional, but psychological: It creates an expectation of collective defense that exists in the mind of anyone who would threaten a member of the alliance. If the Soviet Union never attacked West Germany between 1949 and 1989, that was not because it feared a German response. If Russia has not attacked Poland, the Baltic states, or Romania over the past 18 months, that’s not because Russia fears Poland, the Baltic states, or Romania. The Soviet Union held back, and Russia continues to do so now, because of their firm belief in the American commitment to the defense of those countries.
This deterrent effect doesn’t come just from the NATO treaty, a bare-bones document whose signatories simply agree in Article 5 that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” Deterrence comes from the Kremlin’s conviction that Americans really believe in collective defense, that the U.S. military really is prepared for collective defense, and that the U.S. president really is committed to act if collective security is challenged. Trump could end that conviction with a single speech, a single comment, even a single Truth Social post, and it won’t matter if Congress, the media, and the Republican Party are still arguing about the legality of withdrawing from NATO. Once the commander in chief says “I will not come to an ally’s aid if attacked,” why would anyone fear NATO, regardless of what obligations still exist on paper? And once the Russians, or anyone else, no longer fear a U.S. response to an attack, then the chances that they will carry one out grow higher. If such a scenario seems unlikely, it shouldn’t. Before February 2022, many refused to believe there could ever be a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The consequences of such an unprecedented betrayal would reverberate far beyond the simple act of abandoning Europe to Putin’s tender mercies. As Applebaum points out, all American alliances would immediately become suspect, including our commitments to Taiwan, South Korea, and even Israel. She also notes that autocracies such as Russia, China, and Iran would be emboldened as our former allies would naturally gravitate out of necessity toward appeasing them to protect their own interests. Essentially the U.S. military will have lost its prestige, respect, and standing in the world. Trade agreements dependent, either implicitly or explicitly, upon our country's military leverage and reliability would be rendered suspect if not worthless.
As those alliances disintegrated, the entire idea of democratic representation—the idea that people deserve a voice in their own government—would start to erode on a global scale. It wouldn’t happen quickly, as Applebaum notes, but, “By the time people here realize how much has changed, it will be too late.“
It’s difficult to fathom how anyone who understands the sacrifices our military has made over the past seven decades, the wars we have (for better or for worse) involved ourselves in, or the military commitments we have negotiated would be unable to appreciate the consequences of what Trump said to those European leaders in Brussels.
Contrary to Trump’s apparently crass and uninformed understanding, it has never been about altruism or providing a free, unconditional “handout” to Europe, but about our own country’s future and its ability to survive in the world we are faced with. That’s what Trump—by all appearances—seems perfectly willing to throw away.
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