Is Donald Trump an egomaniac with paper-thin skin? Yes. Can he be obnoxious? Does he bloviate and talk in superlatives – both positive and negative – about everything? Yes again.
But can he also get things done? That is a yes as well.
Case in point: getting European countries to FINALLY start paying its way defensively, rather than forcing us to do it for them.
From David Strom’s article at hotair.com:
Ever since the end of the Cold War, the United States has tolerated the systematic demilitarization of NATO countries. When Russian tanks were trained on Germany, that country and its neighbors stood ready to fight alongside the United States to repel Soviet aggression.
Once that threat receded, so did the military capability of the NATO countries, putting all the burden on the United States to defend the Western alliance. Aside from basing rights, it’s really hard to see what our allies could contribute other than token forces should a genuine threat arise.
This might be acceptable, in an odd way, if European countries ceded control of their foreign policy to the United States–you want to rely on our military, then you ought to defer to our policies–but that deal never seemed to have been done. Instead, what Europe got was a military umbrella; what the United States got was bitching, moaning, whining, and demands.
Now that Trump has shut off the money spigot, NATO countries are screaming “Betrayal!”–but they are doing something else as well: they are doing exactly what Trump wants them to. They may portray it as a rebuke to Trump and the United States, and complain that we are no longer a reliable ally.
But the fact is that, for the first time in decades, they may actually meet or even exceed their treaty obligations for military expenditures.
If it took Trump offending them to accomplish this goal, then offending them was the best gift an American president has given them since Reagan ended the Cold War and Bush I helped negotiate a non-violent deconstruction of the Warsaw Pact.
Is that really what is happening? It certainly seems so.
And, let’s remember, it is also what Trump did during his first presidential term – which caused Europe and Canada to increase NATO contributions by billions and billions of dollars.
Once Trump was gone, Biden was elected, and whoever was running the country during his term of office took over, European NATO members went right back to their old ways. But with Trump back in the Oval Office, they – gasp!!! – again have to actually pay for us to defend them, rather than underpaying and getting us to foot most of the bill for the privilege of providing them with our military support anyway.
This is something most of our mainstream media do not talk about; too much Trump hatred for that. But it is a major plus of having him in office; one that would never, ever have occurred if Kamala Harris/Tim Walz were running things.
It is one of the reasons that, as undesirable as I find Donald Trump personally, I am relieved he won last year’s election.
