https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-us-army-general-says-091951387.html A former US Army general says Trump wants the US to abandon NATO because he's a 'mafia type' that 'hates alliances' Kwan Wei Kevin Tan Tue, February 13, 2024 at 10:19 AM GMT+1·2 min read Donald Trump wants the US to abandon NATO because he "hates alliances," says a former Army general. Ben Hodges said he thinks Trump is a "mafia type" who "doesn't want anybody restricting his options." "He couldn't care less about moral obligations. ," Hodges said. A former US Army general says Donald Trump's animosity toward NATO has nothing to do with its members not spending enough on their own defense. "Trump hates alliances. He hates an obligation where he'd have to live up to something," retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of US Army Europe, told the British newspaper The Times in a story published Monday. "Mafia type that he is, he doesn't want anybody restricting his options. He couldn't care less about moral obligations. He's willing to chuck the whole thing away," the retired lieutenant general added. On Saturday, Trump said at a rally in South Carolina that he'd encourage Russia to do "whatever the hell they want" to NATO members who aren't meeting their spending obligations. The former president has received backlash for his remarks on the military alliance. On Saturday night, the White House slammed Trump's comments, calling them "appalling and unhinged." While some GOP officials have downplayed Trump's remarks as a negotiating tactic, Hodges told The Times that he believed Trump was "absolutely prepared" to abandon Europe if he was elected president again. "We would be foolish not to take at face value exactly what he says," Hodges told the newspaper. "In his last term, he did have people around him who were able to moderate certain things, at least for a period of time." "He won't make that mistake again," Hodges said. Hodges isn't the first person to have likened Trump to the mafia. Trump's former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, told The Washington Post in June 2022 that his ex-boss was like a "mob boss." Cohen made the remarks after the committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot alleged that Trump's allies had intimidated witnesses. "Donald Trump never changes his playbook. He behaves like a mob boss, and these messages are fashioned in that style," Cohen told The Post. "Giving an order without giving the order. No fingerprints attached." Representatives for Trump and Hodges did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.
Maybe, they paid a bit more but, not the entire amount they were supposed to? I would tend to believe NATO leaders in Germany and other countries who said that a lot of NATO members were not paying their fair share. There is no reason for them to lie in this instance atleast. They lie a lot about the Ukraine war and how Ukraine is doing. Trump might be burnishing his image quite a bit. If Trump closed US bases in Europe, it would probably, would have gotten their attention more than anything else. And showed everyone in NATO he was dead serious.
‘Everyone should be scared as hell’: Democrats call for Trump-proofing NATO Trump would be barred from pulling the U.S. out of the alliance as president. But there are other ways he could undermine it. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/12/democrats-guardrails-nato-trump-00141041
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/13/opinions/trump-pull-out-nato-bergen/index.html Opinion: How serious is Trump about pulling out of NATO? Very Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN 4 minute read Published 8:25 AM EST, Tue February 13, 2024 Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room,” also on Apple and Spotify. He is the author of The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion at CNN. CNN — President Donald Trump’s then-defense secretary, James Mattis, said in 2017 that NATO is the “most successful and powerful military alliance in modern history.” Yet, at a campaign rally over the weekend, Trump said he wouldn’t come to the aid of NATO members if Russia attacked them, which was the whole point of the alliance in the first place. Trump said, “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.” Trump has long criticized European countries in NATO on the rationale that they purportedly don’t pay their fair share. The idea that foreign countries are freeloading off the United States plays well with his base, but Trump either doesn’t understand how NATO works or chooses not to. In fact, all the countries in NATO pay into a common fund supporting the alliance’s day-to-day workings, and no country is in arrears on those payments. Meanwhile, in 2014, all NATO countries agreed to spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense by this year. Every US president since Barack Obama has pressed NATO countries to reach that expenditure level, but at the time of the agreement, only three NATO countries — the US, United Kingdom and Greece — were doing so. Since the foreign leader often praised by Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, particularly NATO’s European members bordering Russia or Ukraine, like Estonia, Lithuania and Romania, have stepped up spending to more than 2%. The war in Ukraine is also forcing Germany to end its long policy of spending a relatively small amount of its GDP on defense. Hours after Trump’s NATO comments, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Monday said his government would meet its commitment to spend 2% of GDP on defense this year. European countries fear that Putin might not stop at Ukraine if he is victorious and that if a second Trump presidency were indeed to happen, it might gravely imperil NATO. In fact, defense spending among NATO countries is growing fast. In 2017, NATO European countries and Canada spent around $270 billion on their defense, while the United States spent around $626 billion. As of 2023, European countries and Canada spent $356 billion on defense, while the US spent $743 billion, according to NATO. Of the 31 countries in NATO, 11 now meet the 2% or above expenditure target. It’s not an accident that during NATO’s 75 years, the US became the most powerful and wealthy country in history. But that thought seems not to have occurred to Trump, who is always looking to attack countries that are supposedly ripping off the US. Indeed, Trump has had similar beliefs about US allies for almost four decades. In 1987, Trump paid for a full-page ad in the New York Times featuring an open letter in which he claimed, “For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States…. Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend as allies.” Around the same time, Trump gave a speech in New Hampshire, asserting that Japan and Saudi Arabia were “ripping us off.” These attitudes continued when he was president; Trump was annoyed that while the Germans had the second largest economy in NATO, they then spent only around 1% of their GDP on defense, while the US spent around 4%. Trump interpreted the Germans’ underspending on defense as if he were a landlord collecting on overdue rent. But in NATO, each country decides how much it wants to spend on its own defense, so if a government chooses to spend less than the agreed-upon target of 2% of GDP, the United States isn’t “owed” anything. When then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrived in Washington on her first official visit in March 2017, Trump’s staff produced a chart showing that Germany was supposedly $600 billion in arrears. Trump waved the “invoice” at Merkel, who told Trump, “Don’t you understand this is not real?” according to an account of the meeting in a book I wrote about Trump’s foreign policy, “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” Trump also seems to not care that the only time that NATO’s Article 5 was invoked, triggering the alliance’s collective self-defense, was after his hometown of New York City was attacked on 9/11 , nor does he seem to care that the UK lost 455 soldiers in Afghanistan fighting on behalf of the US-led war there, while Canada lost 158 soldiers, France lost 86, and Germany lost 54. No matter how wrong-headed it might be, according to his close advisers Trump seems quite serious about getting out of NATO. When I spoke to Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, last summer for the podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen,” he told me that Trump “would fundamentally reexamine the premise of NATO, which is the predicate for what I think he would do in a second Trump term, which is withdraw the United States from NATO itself.” That would be a massive mistake. Why a newly elected Trump would choose to try to undercut such a successful alliance or even break it up is a confounding mystery.
trump has almost never done anything he has said in his crazy election promises..... so I think we are safe
GOP Senate meets with their Sith Lord over Ukraine. GOP senators speak with Trump about Ukraine aid loan pitch https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4464734-gop-senators-speak-with-trump-on-ukraine-aid-pitch/
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/13/politics/biden-trump-nato-comments/index.html Biden accuses Trump of bowing to Putin by encouraging Russia to invade NATO allies that don’t meet their obligations By Kevin Liptak and Michael Williams, CNN 3 minute read Published 3:10 PM EST, Tue February 13, 2024 President Joe Biden on Tuesday slammed Donald Trump after the former president said he would encourage Russia to invade countries that don’t meet their NATO obligations, saying such comments amount to bowing down to Vladimir Putin. The remarks – Biden’s latest criticism of Trump from the White House – are some of his harshest criticism of his likely rival on foreign policy to date. Speaking Saturday at a rally in South Carolina, Trump said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member country that doesn’t meet spending guidelines on defense. Biden said those comments sent a “dangerous and shocking” signal. “Can you imagine a former president of the United States saying that?” Biden asked incredulously from the State Dining Room. “The whole world heard it. The worst thing is he means it.” Biden began his speech by encouraging the House of Representatives to “immediately” hold a vote on the Senate-passed, $95 billion supplemental aid package that would provide assistance to Ukraine, Israel and US partners in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. More than $60 billion from the Senate package would have been allocated to Ukraine, as the country prepares to mark the second anniversary of its full-scale invasion by Russia. Previous attempts to pass an aid package – combined with a border security bill – were scuttled after Trump came out in opposition. Trump’s comment drew immediate consternation, not only from the American foreign policy establishment but from NATO allies, who have watched warily as Russia proceeds with its invasion of Ukraine. For Biden, who has spent much of his career working on issues related to transatlantic security, the remark was particularly galling. When he heard about the remarks afterward, the president was aghast, according to a person familiar with the matter. He later issued a statement through his campaign decrying the sentiment. The White House criticized Trump’s comments shortly after they were made. “Encouraging invasions of our closest allies by murderous regimes is appalling and unhinged – and it endangers American national security, global stability, and our economy at home,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement on Saturday. But Biden’s criticism of Trump from the White House went a step further. In a speech that mentioned Trump by name at least a half-dozen times, Biden sought to forcefully rebut questions about American commitment to its allies. “No other president in our history has bowed down to a Russian dictator,” Biden went on. “Let me say this as clearly as I can: I never will. For God’s sake, it’s dumb. It’s shameful. It’s dangerous. It’s un-American.” On Tuesday, Biden spent a significant portion of his speech on Ukraine aid going after Trump for the remark, which he said undercut longstanding US values. “When America gives its word, it means something. When we make a commitment, we keep it and NATO is a sacred commitment,” Biden said. “Donald Trump looks at this as if it’s a burden,” he added. He said Trump viewed the defense alliance as a “protection racket” and didn’t understand its role in protecting freedom and security. “For Trump, principles never matter. Everything is transactional,” Biden said. He said American adversaries “all cheered” when they heard Trump’s comments. “I will not walk away. I can’t imagine any other president walking away,” Biden said.
Biden is slowly waking up. Haley needs to be more outspoken whenever Trump is un-American. The Independents need to wake up too when he praises a dictator against NATO, against allies countries, or against Democracy. Together, they can close the saga of the wannabe Trump Dictator forever. wrbtrader