I’m sure Trump will respond by having Fox run out the Clinton accusers again.
Isn’t it a fine bit of schadenfreude that this is hosted by Megyn Kelly?
This is not really a good response, for painfully obvious reasons.
It is not that painfully obvious for me obviously. Feel free to enligthening me on your path to militarizing the world against imaginary threats with antiquitated weaponry.
He 100% watched 8 hours a day, now I’m positive.
They said that 2 days ago. Scarborough mentioned it like 10 minutes before he Tweeted.
Saying you don’t need to abide by the requirements of NATO, because it’s a non binding agreement effectively supports Trump’s suggestion that we don’t need to come to your aid, since it’s a non binding agreement.
Both suggestions are foolish.
The NATO treaty is a binding commitment to mutual defence. The 2% target is a non-binding target set by agreement among NATO members, not within the treaty. And, as I’ve said before, it doesn’t even say they should have a 2% expenditure now, so they aren’t failing to meet it. They just haven’t met it yet.
It was an agreement made by all of the member states, over ten years ago. On some level, you can’t really say you’re “trying” to meet a spending level if you’ve made little to no progress over a decade.
You CERTAINLY can’t say, “Well that’s not binding, so we don’t have to do it anyway!” like Lynch did, because that implies that the agreement was made in bad faith. The NATO member states issued a summit declaration, which is the most official political mechanism they had at their disposal. If it means nothing, then the agreement as a whole really means nothing.
The NATO agreement, like all Treaties, is not really binding except by the faith of those participating in it.
If countries specifically thumb their noses at the spending levels, and just expect that the US is responsible for everything, that’s the kind of thing which gives ammunition to idiots like Trump, and ultimately undermines the treaty.
I’m not saying it means nothing. I’m just saying that people, including Trump, are constantly saying that because country X spends less than 2% of its GDP on defence now, it is in actual breach of the agreement. But that’s not what the agreement says. By all means say they should be doing more, but that’s not the argument that most people make.
Well, Trump is an imbecile. Hell, he seems to think that other NATO nations are supposed to be paying us money or something. Because, again, he’s an imbecile.
But I still take issue with Lynch’s suggestion that NATO nations aren’t obligated to meet those requirements, because if NATO nations aren’t committed to the partnership, then it’s very difficult to argue that the US should be committed to it, because it ends up just being the US paying for the defense of other nations.
Ultimately, my belief is that NATO is important for all parties involved, but I find it hard to articulate a good defense of why only a few of its members are contributing to the military investment, and that’s a problem, because it fuels idiots like Trump.
It’s in the US’s interest to keep NATO countries free of Russian influence. It’s not easy to NOT provide the military protection. We can’t really be isolationist. We have to be part of the global economy to continue to prosper.
They should meet their commitment, but if they don’t, what happens? We tell them to leave NATO and ask the Russians to provide them with military protection?
As I said, I totally support NATO, and I personally recognize why its in our own best interests to do so.
But at the same time, it’s difficult to say why it’s more in our interests than the interests of the nations who are actually directly threatened by Russia. It ends up just being that we’re footing the bill for their defense.
And it’s hard to justify why the US should be spending that money rather than the folks in those countries.
I agree, but the problem is what leverage do we have to get them to meet their obligation?
It’s largely a game of chicken.
Once upon a time, anyway.
Well, it’s still in the interest of the US, just maybe not our President,lol.
The US doesn’t spend extra to cover the lack of expenses of other NATO countries, the 2% refers to the annual defense budget target for each country. As for the US interest, it’s not complicated. Serbia, not in NATO, friendly to Russia, does not even have an App store, while Romania, its eastern NATO member neighbour is a booming multimillion dollar market for Apple and many other US companies.
Investments in democracies have generally been very profitable for the US, in the long term.