Eighteen months into his presidency, Donald Trump continues to display near complete ignorance about how NATO works and why the alliance matters. He tweets that the United States gives 4 percent of its GDP to NATO. (Not so: we spend 4 percent on defense; we actually contribute less than $500 million directly to NATO for its combined civil and military budgets, or less than one-10th of 1 percent of our defense budget.) He sees NATO as a charity project for Europeans rather than a cornerstone of U.S. national security. And, as we learned from his Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night, he is willing to call into question Article 5— the alliance’s mutual defense provision. He appears either unable to comprehend that an ironclad commitment to Article 5 is at the heart of NATO, or is purposefully undermining the alliance in the wake of his traitorous performance in Helsinki.
In his interview, Carlson didn’t evoke Article 5 with respect to Germany or France. He chose to pick on tiny Montenegro. Despite Montenegro’s having joined NATO only last year, during Trump’s presidency, Trump readily agreed. He bizarrely characterized Montenegrins as “aggressive” and suggested that our commitment to defend them might ensnare us in “World War III.”
