Libs eating Libs over Biden stance in Israel

[CJD]

(11-06-2023, 02:02 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Some interesting positions here.  I have a few follow ups.  I see Trump "weakening" NATO raised a lot.  I don't know if that's necessarily the case.  I'm sure both of you could provide specific examples of this, but I also recall him castigating NATO members for not living up to the agreed upon defense budgets (Germany especially).  I do recall him warning Europe about Putin and his using his gas and heating oil supplies to hold them hostage..  Are you both referring to his being abrasive and turning our allies off because of that?  Because while I will certainly acknowledge that being the case my response to it is, where are they gonna go?  Is the POTUS being an ass who berates you publicly enough to throw your lot in with the China axis, including Iran, Russia and North Korea?  I would think not.  Go it alone as the EU?  Good luck with that.

I think the worst case for NATO under Trump is hard feelings that dissipate a few years into a more normal presidency.  Honestly, I think getting rid of NATO is a good idea.  By that I mean abandoning the name and it's cold war implications, and expanding the alliance to include democracies like Japan and South Korea, maybe even India is they can make some guarantees.  Call it something else, keep the same structure, agreements and guarantees.  I honestly think something as simple as a name change would go some ways towards making Russia less bellicose about the alliance.

The thing I was thinking of was the rumblings from White House aides and staff members saying Trump had privately discussed leaving NATO over the other NATO members not meeting their required defense spending.

Trump later mentioned that he did in fact threaten to leave NATO in private conversations in one of his meandering "Sir" speeches:

Quote:Someone said, “Sir!” Someone calls me Sir, that that shows me respect. He says, “would you leave us if we don’t pay our bills?” They hated my answer. I said, “Yeah, I would consider it.” They hated the answer Michael Powell. But if I said, “No, I won’t leave you. I promise you we will always protect you.” Then they will never pay their bills. So I said, “Yes, I will leave you.” You could see those checkbooks coming out for billions of dollars. They paid their bills. I think we will pick up in the next short while over $100 billion.

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/trump-confirms-he-threatened-to-withdraw-from-nato/

Normally, I would have just brushed this off as Trump talking about all the things he plans to do but never does, but this was shortly after he did withdraw from the Paris Agreement and around the time he ended up withdrawing from the Iran deal.

Now, leaving NATO would have been a much larger step than leaving either of those agreements, but the precedent was there for him to just...leave international agreements if he didn't like them. And he claims he only threatened it to make them pay their share, but he still discussed the possibility, whether he would have actually done it or not is another question. Leaving NATO didn't feel like that big of a leap after those two withdrawals.