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Originally Posted by Yssup Rider
different link.same facts
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FTFY
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Originally Posted by Submodo
Really? Our allies don't trust us???? That's good. So Germany and Japan and S. Korea and all the other countries that US taxpayers pay to defend will be no longer needing us, right? So we can cut about 50% of the military budget an get back to defending the US.
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Trump's NATO heresy was Eisenhower's wisdom: James Robbins
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opini...lumn/91282406/
Then why are people so mad? Because The Donald might actually do something about it.
James S. Robbins
"There is no reason for the American taxpayers, in the face of our own substantial deficit, to continue to subsidize Germany, France, England, Norway, Belgium and other prosperous European democracies." Is that Donald Trump going off again about NATO? Will Hillary Clinton smack him down for his reckless rhetoric? Are we on the brink of an international crisis?
Oh wait, it was uber-liberal Rep.
Barney Frank, D-Mass., in 1994, talking about a NATO burden-sharing amendment to the defense authorization act. He wanted to start pulling troops out of Europe unless our allies paid more to keep them there.
OK, well how about someone saying that unless European allies started spending more on capability and work out cooperation with NATO, the alliance could become "a
relic of history”? That undiplomatic, irresponsible comment had to be Trump, right? No, it was President Bill Clinton’s secretary of Defense, William Cohen, fulminating at a NATO meeting in 2000.
This one just has to be Trump: “Turkey even gets to renegotiate (NATO) base rights every year. I don't know what genius negotiated that deal, but every year we give Turkey the option to shoot at our feet and say, '
Tap-dance, Uncle Sam!’ ... As long as (our NATO allies) can get one more bite out of the apple, nobody is going to voluntarily say, 'We will pay more money.’ ” Hillary Clinton would jump on that comment, calling it uncouth, destructive and careless. Oh but sorry, it was Colorado member of Congress and feminist icon Patricia Schroeder criticizing NATO way back in 1988.
Politicians have been getting upset over NATO burden-sharing for a long time, at least since President
Eisenhower fumed over the Europeans “making a sucker out of Uncle Sam.” Trump is just the latest public figure to say the free-riders need to pay their freight.
Trump’s insistence that our NATO partners pay their bills or else has generated an overheated response. Clinton’s campaign frets that Trump’s position is an attack on the integrity of the alliance itself. Former secretary of State Madeleine
Albright fulminated about Trump’s “irresponsible” comments, accusing him of “blackmailing our partners.”
But back in 1997, Secretary Albright told Congress that she'd “insist that our old allies share this burden fairly. That's what NATO is all about." She must not have insisted very hard because a study group she
chaired in 2010 found that “the primary limiting factor hindering (NATO) military transformation has been the lack of European defense spending and investment.”
That same year, then-Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates discussed the “NATO budgetary crisis” and noted how few allies are meeting their defense spending targets. He said this could create “real or perceived weakness” that would be “a temptation to miscalculation and aggression.” In other words, the threat to peace and stability isn't Trump's irresponsible rhetoric; it is Europe's irresponsibly low defense spending.
NATO “doesn't fund itself. Just come with me to my constituencies and ask them whether or not we should primarily fund it.”
Vice President Biden made this veiled threat at a NATO summit in 2015. He added that “every NATO country needs to meet its commitment to devote 2% of its GDP to defense.” But only
five of the 28 NATO countries clear this bar — Estonia, Greece, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States. And U.S. outlays cover
$650 billion of the $900 billion spent by NATO's member nations on their military budgets, or 72%.
Not only is Trump right on the facts, his more forceful tone also might be the tonic needed to shake the other 23 countries out of their complacency and meet their obligations. The only difference between Trump’s approach to NATO burden-sharing and those of his predecessors is that he might finally get our allies to pony up.
Allies. you mentioned our worthless loser allies who soak the american tax payer to defend their nations.
IT'S TIME TO CONSIGN NATO TO HISTORY, AND LOOK TO FUTURE
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...263-story.html
A he assumed command of
NATO forces in Europe in 1951, General of the Armies Dwight D. Eisenhower uttered prophetic words of caution:
"If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project will have failed." One can only speculate about his response if he were to learn now that almost 150,000 American troops are still in Europe 43 years later, and we are planning to keep 100,000 troops there into the 21st Century.
His first question might well be, "Who are we defending Europe against now? I thought that the Soviet Union had disappeared three years ago." The answer would certainly astound him, particularly when he learned that NATO's former adversaries, including Russia, are now all aligned with NATO in a "Partnership for Peace."
