The BBC posted an in-dept report on the crises in many European capitals on how to protect the continent from Putin after Trump has upended the NATO alliance since taking office.
Nato was formed as part of the Truman Doctrine to support democracies in Europe fighting against Soviet expansion post-WWII, and after the British became broke from all the wars then withdrew from India and other territories formerly under the influence of the Ottoman Empire.
Exhausted, broke and heavily in debt to the United States, Britain told the US that it could no longer continue its support for the Greek government forces that were fighting an armed Communist insurgency. Britain had already announced plans to pull out of Palestine and India and to wind down its presence in Egypt.
The United States saw immediately that there was now a real danger that Greece would fall to the Communists and, by extension, to Soviet control. And if Greece went, the United States feared that Turkey could be next, giving Moscow control of the Eastern Mediterranean including, potentially, the Suez Canal, a vital global trade route.
Almost overnight, the United States stepped into the vacuum left by the departing British.
Fast forward many decades, and now we have Trump who has sided with fascism and has supported Putin at the expense of our traditional allies in Europe. After Trump belittled Zelenskyy at the White House, western Europe has been grappling with how to fill a huge security void and his indifference to international law. Trump has even threatened to illegally invade and annex the territory of members in Nato.
Ben Wallace, who was defence secretary in the last Conservative government, told me earlier this month: "I think Article 5 is on life support.
"If Europe, including the United Kingdom, doesn't step up to the plate, invest a lot on defence and take it seriously, it's potentially the end of the Nato that we know and it'll be the end of Article 5.
"Right now, I wouldn't bet my house that Article 5 would be able to be triggered in the event of a Russian attack… I certainly wouldn't take for granted that the United States would ride to the rescue."
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"The damage Trump has done to Nato is probably irreparable," argues Robert Kagan, a conservative commentator, author and senior fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington DC who has been a long time critic of Trump.
"The alliance relied on an American guarantee that is no longer reliable, to say the least".
Please read the full report here:
www.bbc.com/…
