LindaK wrote:
President Trump wanted out of NATO??? He sure had a weird way of showing it then. The head of NATO (at that time) praised and thanked Pres Trump for bringing in more funding TO NATO during the time frame when Trump was asking all nations to pay at least 2% of their own nations GDP’s to pay their fair share of supporting that organization.
Obama had already gained the promise of all NATO nations to do the 2% and all trump did was repeat the facts and then hold a press conference to take credit for it..
Now... look at his real intentions as revealed by those who at one time were in his innermost circle..
You do not pay attention to anything at all that is not full support of the orange sprayed criminal who wants to destroy America if he can make money doing it..
Trump is a pox upon America and those that support his criminality should suffer the hanging alongside of him..
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/trump-2024-reelection-pull-out-of-nato-membership/676120/NATO
If reelected, he would end our commitment to the European alliance, reshaping the international order and hobbling American influence in the world.
By Anne Applebaum
Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.
“I don’t give a shit about NATO.” Thus did former President Donald Trump once express his feelings about America’s oldest and strongest military alliance. Not that this statement, made in the presence of John Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, came as a surprise. Long before he was a political candidate, Trump questioned the value of American alliances. Of Europeans, he once wrote that “their conflicts are not worth American lives. Pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually.” NATO, founded in 1949 and supported for three-quarters of a century by Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike, has long been a particular focus of Trump’s ire. As president, Trump threatened to withdraw from NATO many times—including, infamously, at the 2018 NATO summit.
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But during Trump’s time in office, the withdrawal never happened. That was because someone was always there to talk him out of it. Bolton says he did; Jim Mattis, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, and even Mike Pence are thought to have done so too.
But they didn’t change his mind. And if Trump is reelected in 2024, none of those people will be in the White House. All of them have broken with the former president, in some cases dramatically, and there isn’t another pool of Republican analysts who understand Russia and Europe, because most of them either signed statements opposing him in 2016 or criticized him after 2020. In a second term, Trump would be surrounded by people who either share his dislike of American security alliances or don’t know anything about them and don’t care. This time, the ill will that Trump has always felt toward American allies would likely manifest itself in a clear policy change. “The damage he did in his first term was reparable,” Bolton told me. “The damage in the second term would be irreparable.”