Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Trump Deals NATO Fatal Blow
The NATO alliance has been one of the most effective bulwarks for world peace in all of history. Europe's past is littered with war, but for the last 75 years, NATO has kept a lid on almost all of it. The idea, as one wag put is, was to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down. The Trump administration yesterday made it clear that the American administration is no longer interested in doing its part. The betrayal of Ukraine and every other NATO member by the administration is a shameful, foolish, dangerous and stupid move. The deed is done, though, and any trust the other members may have had in the US is gone. Without trust, the NATO Treaty is just ink-stained paper.
Alliances have been part of human society since the beginning. In military science, they count as force multipliers. These arrangements can maintain balances of power that might otherwise not even exist, and they form the basis of closer ties in other areas like commerce and culture.
For an alliance to be possible, there must be at least two sides with common interests, in this case dozens of sides with the interest of keeping peace in Europe through mutual defense. For the alliance to work, all parties must believe that the other parties will do as they say when it comes to the common defense. NATO so far has benefited from the fact that this kind of trust was re-inforced by the fundamental nature of the interest, peace.
The first Trump administration weakened that trust, but Joe Biden will go down in history as the man who won back most of it. Unfortunately, the wrong man is in the Oval Office today. Mr. Trump has forced America to switch sides. He went so far as to claim Ukraine started the war.
Mr. Trump also claimed that Ukraine has had three years to make peace with Russia, and he went even claimed that Ukraine could have prevented the war with a deal beforehand. In short, when a bully tries to take a kid's lunch money, the kid should just cut a deal. That does not work on a playground, and it will not work in Eastern Europe.
The European allies were caught flatfooted by this idiocy, a failure of their imaginations. They have started to respond in ways that make sense, but which by their very nature, close the door on working as closely with Washington as before. Many are working on increasing their defense spending, and plans for a European defense force (which go back to the 1940s) are being dusted off. All of which decouples them from the US. There are even benefits to Europe for doing this.
"If Europe could develop the next generation of defense tech and other weapons at home instead of buying them from the US, the economic effects of additional defense spending could go far beyond short-term fiscal multiplier effects and boost growth in the medium term," says Moritz Schularick, President of the Kiel Institute. "An increase in European defense spending from just under 2 percent of GDP to 3.5 percent would currently cost around 300 euros billion per year -- but the study suggests this sum could also generate a similar amount of additional economic activity, if properly spent on developing European capabilities."
What they are giving up, or rather what they have lost that they cannot replace is the American nuclear guarantee. America has thousands of nuclear warheads ready to use against any aggressor if the situation gets bad enough. Until the second Trump administration, that would include any aggressor attack another NATO state. That is over.
Europe does have two nuclear powers, however, France and Britain. Germany and the Scandinavian NATO states could probably build some tomorrow. The thousands of warheads lost because America is unreliable are adequately replaced by the few hundred in Franco-British hands. As Churchill observed, after a certain number more bombs merely make the rubble bounce. A hundred is more than sufficient.
Russia now has America doing its dirty work in undermining western alliances. A weaker West is what many want, but a weaker West also destabilizes the world.
Earth just became a much rougher neighborhood. And America is to blame.
© Copyright 2025 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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