by Michael Tracey
There couldn’t have been a more predictable wave of hysteria after Donald Trump said at one of his rambling rallies this month that if other NATO countries don’t “pay up,” he might just have to tell Russia to go ahead and “do whatever the hell they want” with them. Trump was actually recounting a vague anecdote — something he purportedly said to an unidentified European leader several years ago. Yet the premise of the ensuing hysteria was that Trump, if re-elected in 2024, would surely move to withdraw the U.S. from NATO as his first sinister order of business — because of course, Trump continues to have a burning desire to help Vladimir Putin.
Anyone who still buys into this storyline must have been hibernating since 2016. Or perhaps they were awake the whole time, but their belief in Trump’s nefarious alignment with Russia is so deeply ingrained that they no longer have the ability to process countervailing information — including, for example, the things Trump actually did when he was president for four years.
It’s true that focusing on Trump’s actual policy record, rather than what he blurts out at a campaign rally or in a Truth Social post, can be the less exciting analytical approach. But it also happens to be the most factual and rational one.
Unfortunately, the media’s professional Trump alarmists simply cannot countenance a reality-based version of Trump, so instead they must eternally cling to their fictionalized, Putin-colluding version. They might not even know, for instance, that Trump presided over two rounds of NATO expansion — Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020. While perhaps not the most formidable powers in the NATO military alliance, their seamless absorption was made possible by Trump’s fulsome support for enlarging the bloc — notwithstanding any vague NATO-skeptical rhetoric he might have inchoately dabbled in.
Proceeding with these rounds of NATO expansion required Trump to take presidential action on multiple occasions, including personally signing the final ‘instrument of accession’ formalizing the countries as NATO member-states. Philip Reeker, a State Department official testifying on behalf of the Trump Administration in support of expanding NATO, said in 2019: “Let me begin by reaffirming the role of NATO. As President Trump has said, the alliance has been the bulwark of international peace and security for 70 years.”
Given the wildly disproportionate attention paid to Trump rhetoric over Trump policy, few of the current media alarmists are likely even aware that Trump expanded NATO twice. Nor could they come up with a convincing explanation for how this fits with their hallucinogenic nightmare of Trump surrendering NATO to Putin.
Congressman Mike Turner (R-OH) was called forth to address Trump’s comments while hobnobbing at the annual Munich Security confab last weekend. “This is what I know,” Turner said. “Donald Trump’s political rallies don’t really translate into Donald Trump’s actual policies. If you look at his policies, if you look at his record, he actually increased funding for NATO.”
“In fact,” Turner said, Trump “was the first president to give lethal weapons to Ukraine.”
Both assertions from Turner have the unusual benefit of being true, whether or not you think either act (increasing funding to NATO or sending lethal weapons to Ukraine) is a good thing. Trump still did both of them.
Under Trump, the budget for something called the “European Deterrence Initiative,” a Pentagon program designed to “deter” Russia by building up NATO capacity in Europe, ballooned by several billions of dollars. Just another curiously missing fact from the standard howling media screeds:
Trump has also bragged consistently about how powerful and effective the Javelin missiles he sent to Ukraine were at killing Russian soldiers during their initial advance on Kyiv in early 2022. Ukrainian influencers became so enamored of the Javelins that they turned it into a national branding campaign, with illustrated renderings of “Saint Javelin” to become a fabled wartime icon. So it’s strange for it not to be more widely recognized that those revered Javelins were first delivered to Ukraine courtesy of Donald J. Trump.
For all the default assumptions that Trump has some obvious affinity for Putin, the public record ironically contains not a single negative word Trump has ever said about Volodymyr Zelensky — if anything, Trump has routinely praised Zelensky, often fondly reminiscing about how Zelensky defended him over their 2019 phone call that led to Trump’s first impeachment. On the other hand, in the weeks after the Ukraine invasion began, Trump joined Biden in accusing Putin of perpetrating “genocide.”
Putin himself commented recently that NATO “has just one purpose — as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy.” To the extent this is true, Trump has no self-interested reason to arbitrarily forfeit such a valuable instrument of American power — with the best evidence for this being that Trump didn’t do it in his first term. Instead, he sought to bolster NATO by rhetorically pressuring European member-states to increase their military expenditure, while on a policy level increasing overall U.S. support for NATO. According to NATO’s own figures, military spending in European NATO members-states went up every year Trump was in office. Why we’re supposed to believe Putin was delighted by this fact remains a mystery.
Many pundits still can’t quite comprehend that Trump is a staunch proponent of American hegemony — of which NATO is a major aspect — but not out of some deep ideological conviction in the everlasting sanctity of American imperium. Rather, he dispenses with the pieties often favored by other kinds of American hegemonists, especially the liberal interventionists always tirelessly sermonizing about the “rules-based international order,” as well as the rock-ribbed National Security conservatives who’re always agitating for ruthless military and ideological primacy against whichever Official Adversary has been selected to make everyone fearful that day.
The Democrats have been trying t o dismantle our National Defense Disarm all law abiding Americans open our Borders their the real Traitors and the M.S. Media are their Partners in Crime
Just more disinformation designed to paint President Trump in a negative light. democrats lie, lie and lie again. The world and America would be far better off were there no democrats.
Any argument the left makes necessitates ignoring reality. Trump speaks clearly and plainly in terms that people, as well as diplomats, can understand. NATO members damned sure understood what Trump was saying, whether it was rhetoric or his intention. They KNEW they weren’t meeting their commitments and had no excuses, so they began to meet them.
To no one’s surprise, when an incompetent, weak, stupid, mealy-mouthed moron like Robin Ware/Robert L. Peters/JRB Ware/Pedo Peter/idiot Biden comes in office, NATO members fall of the commitment wagon and backslide into their parasitic mode.