Trump Targets NATO

General Dwight David Eisenhower

In 1949 General Dwight David Eisenhower said when NATO was founded, if it exists in ten years it will have been a failure. Today NATO is a large bureaucracy not a coalition of military forces. Nonetheless, this argument may be correct that it is a proper entity to fight Muslim terrorism.

[From article]
It is improbable that Trump has thought long or deeply on the subject of NATO, but he has opened a genuine debate on it. NATO, founded on April 4, 1949 by 12 countries, was a product of the Cold War mainly intended to provide collective security against the Soviet Union and its satellite countries in the Warsaw Pact. After the end of the Soviet Union this particular main objective was no longer germane but NATO increased to 28 countries.
NATO has always been dominated by the U.S., a reality leading to both foreign and domestic criticism for different reasons. The strongest expression of disapproval was by French president Charles de Gaulle. In a letter of March 7, 1966, he told President Lyndon B. Johnson that France expected to remain a party to the NATO treaty. However, because changes had occurred in international affairs since 1949, France could not agree to the existing military arrangements.
[. . .]
Despite some criticism, Europeans have generally welcomed the U.S. role in NATO. However, it has troubled Americans, and Donald Trump, perhaps inadvertently, has touched on the problem.
[. . .]
In all, the U.S. provides 73 per cent of NATO’s defense spending.
[. . .]
Trump has raised a crucial question: is the U.S. spending on NATO worth it, and indeed is NATO relevant? In recent decades, NATO played a role in various non-North Atlantic conflicts in Afghanistan, in enforcing a no-fly zone in Bosnia in 1993, and in Libya in March 2011 when an allied coalition decided to enforce an arms embargo, to maintain a no-fly zone, and to protect civilians under attack. But NATO did not intervene in Syria,
[. . .]



The U.S. is planning to increase its troop presence in Europe by 3 brigades and by stationing heavy equipment in Eastern Europe.
NATO has played a significant role in maintaining peace in Europe, but this preparation for defense against the more assertive Russia is now the wrong priority for NATO. The challenge to international order does not come from Moscow but from other parties. NATO as an organization should concentrate on two issues: defeating Islamist terrorism; and solving the growing immigration crisis.
[. . .]
Islamist terrorism, by ISIS, al-Qaeda and others has made NATO relevant. It is fair criticism that NATO has been insufficiently geared to combat the upsurge in international terrorism or to help in the immigration crisis.
Among other actions, NATO is belatedly sending ships to Eastern Mediterranean to combat people smugglers, monitoring the flow of migrants and working in harmony with coast guards in Greece and Turkey. NATO is using five warships, as well as other ships, to help stem the flow of migrants to Europe by its presence in the Mediterranean and in the Aegean Sea. As a byproduct of this, the two historical foes, Greece and Turkey, are collaborating.
[. . .]
NATO is not obsolete. In the fight against terrorism it can help the countries that share in common the values of democracy, free speech, and the rule of law.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/03/donald_trump_and_nato.html

April 2, 2016
Donald Trump and NATO
By Michael Curtis

Pat Buchanan Recalls Eisenhower on NATO, Agrees With Trump

President Dwight David Eisenhower, the general who managed allied armies and won World War II

With dumbed down politicians, voters and journalists everywhere, Buchanan shows there are some with historical knowledge left. Even at prestigious Harvard University at a lecture at their Center for International Affairs (now the Center for Government and International Studies), by a NATO general, the scholars reacted with shock when I repeated what is reported here. In 1949 Eisenhower said if NATO exists in ten years it will be a failure. Here it is 65 years later and it is only getting bigger and becoming a more dangerous bureaucracy. This statement by Eisenhower is reported in every biography of the great President. Yet few today know what he said. The elitists who mock Trump will not recognize the wisdom of Ike. They mocked him also.  



[From article]
I am “not isolationist, but I am ‘America First,'” Donald Trump told The New York times last weekend. “I like the expression.”
Of NATO, where the U.S. underwrites three-fourths of the cost of defending Europe, Trump calls this arrangement “unfair, economically, to us,” and adds, “We will not be ripped off anymore.”
[. . .]
For the Donald’s ideas are not lacking for authoritative support.
The first NATO supreme commander, Gen. Eisenhower, said in February 1951 of the alliance: “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.”
As JFK biographer Richard Reeves relates, President Eisenhower, a decade later, admonished the president-elect on NATO.
“Eisenhower told his successor it was time to start bringing the troops home from Europe. ‘America is carrying far more than her share of free world defense,’ he said. It was time for other nations of NATO to take on more of the costs of their own defense.”
No Cold War president followed Ike’s counsel.
[. . .]
The conservative coalition that had united in the Cold War fractured. Some of us argued that when the Russian troops went home from Europe, the American troops should come home from Europe.
Time for a populous prosperous Europe to start defending itself.
Instead, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush began handing out NATO memberships, i.e., war guarantees, to all ex-Warsaw Pact nations and even Baltic republics that had been part of the Soviet Union.
In a historically provocative act, the U.S. moved its “red line” for war with Russia from the Elbe River in Germany to the Estonian-Russian border, a few miles from St. Petersburg.
We declared to the world that should Russia seek to restore its hegemony over any part of its old empire in Europe, she would be at war with the United States.
[. . .]



Recall. Ike did not intervene to save the Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956. Lyndon Johnson did not lift a hand to save the Czechs, when Warsaw Pact armies crushed “Prague Spring” in 1968. Reagan refused to intervene when Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, on Moscow’s orders, smashed Solidarity in 1981.
These presidents put America first. All would have rejoiced in the liberation of Eastern Europe. But none would have committed us to war with a nuclear-armed nation like Russia to guarantee it.
[. . .]
While Trump is focusing on how America is bearing too much of the cost of defending Europe, it is the risks we are taking that are paramount, risks no Cold War president ever dared to take.
Why should America fight Russia over who rules in the Baltic States or Romania and Bulgaria? When did the sovereignty of these nations become interests so vital we would risk a military clash with Moscow that could escalate into nuclear war? Why are we still committed to fight for scores of nations on five continents?
Trump is challenging the mindset of a foreign policy elite whose thinking is frozen in a world that disappeared around 1991.

http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-right-nato-125052

Is Trump Right About NATO?
Monday - March 28, 2016 at 8:12 pm

Patrick J. Buchanan

Evaluating Middle East Conflicts, And Their Effects on US Interests

[rom article]
Like every regime in the Middle East, the Saudis look out for their own national interests first. And their goals here are to first force us to choose between them and Iran, and then to conscript U.S. power on their side in the coming wars of the Middle East.
[. . .]
The Turks, too, look out for number one. The Turkish shoot-down of that Russian fighter-bomber, which may have intruded into its airspace for 17 seconds, was both a case in point and a dangerous and provocative act.
Had Vladimir Putin chosen to respond militarily against Turkey, a NATO ally, his justified retaliation could have produced demands from Ankara for the United States to come to its defense against Russia.
[. . .]
Do U.S.-Turkish interests really coincide today?
While Turkey’s half-million-man army could easily seal the Syrian border and keep ISIS fighters from entering or leaving, it has failed to do so. Instead, Turkey is using its army to crush the Kurdish PKK and threaten the Syrian Kurds who are helping us battle ISIS.
[. . .]
“We have no permanent allies … no permanent enemies … only permanent interests” is a loose translation of the dictum of the 19th century British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston.
[. . .]
no nation should be able drag us into a war not of our own choosing.
In cases where we share a common enemy, we should follow the wise counsel of the Founding Fathers and entrust our security, if need be, to “temporary,” but not “permanent” or “entangling alliances.”

http://buchanan.org/blog/will-mideast-allies-drag-us-into-war-124529

Will Mideast Allies Drag Us Into War?
Tuesday - January 5, 2016 at 12:48 am
By Patrick J. Buchanan

Turkey Is A Member of NATO

[From article]
When Turkey was admitted to NATO in 1952, the Cold War was ramping up and the nation was relatively secular. Today, however, it’s well known that Turkey has been Islamizing and that its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is an Islamic supremacist. Also note that Turkey was the location of the last great Islamic caliphate, the Ottoman Empire. And some think that just as Benito Mussolini wanted to resurrect the glories of the Roman Empire, Erdoğan and others want to reclaim the far more recent Ottoman dominance.
[. . .]
Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the only remaining major nation unapologetically Christian, a nation that has rejected the West’s destructive leftist agenda (Putin himself, whether it’s principle or posturing, has served notice that Russia is willing to be Christianity’s standard bearer).
it must be emphasized that an Islamic apocalyptic worldview is so foreign to most Westerners that they can’t even conceive of it. As to this, however, it has been said that if former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had supreme decision-making power in his land, he would "sacrifice half of Iran for the sake of eliminating Israel.” Remember, we’re dealing with adherents who frequently blow themselves up in an effort to take just a few non-believers with them. And with this suicide/homicide-bomber mentality so prevalent, it does follow that, sometime, somewhere, it would have to penetrate into Muslim halls of government.
Is it unfathomable to think [Turkey] might want to start a war between the Christian and secular “infidels”?
[. . .]
It’s important here, however, not to fall victim to that common human failing of mirroring, when we project our own values, priorities and mindset onto others. As Michael Caine’s character explained in the film The Dark Knight, “[S]ome men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/12/turkey_why_muslim_nations_shouldnt_be_part_of_nato.html

December 1, 2015
Turkey: Why Muslim Nations Shouldn't be Part of NATO
By Selwyn Duke

Putting NATO To The Test In Eastern Europe

[From article]
“In a significant move to deter possible Russian aggression in Europe, the Pentagon is poised to store battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and other heavy weapons for as many as 5,000 American troops in several Baltic and Eastern European countries,” said the Times. The sources cited were “American and allied officials.”
The Pentagon’s message received a reply June 16. Russian Gen. Yuri Yakubov called the U.S. move “the most aggressive step by the Pentagon and NATO since the Cold War.” When Moscow detects U.S. heavy weapons moving into the Baltic, said Yakubov, Russia will “bolster its forces and resources on the western strategic theater of operations.”
[. . .]
Lest we forget, while it was Khrushchev who backed down in the Cuban missile crisis, President Eisenhower did nothing to halt the crushing of the Hungarian rebels, Kennedy accepted the Berlin Wall, and Lyndon Johnson refused to lift a finger to save the Czechs when their “Prague Spring” was snuffed out by Warsaw Pact tank armies.
[. . .]
fewer than half of the respondents in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain thought NATO should fight if its Baltic allies were attacked by Russia. Germans, by a 58-38 margin, did not think military force should be used by NATO to defend Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, though that is what Article 5 of the NATO charter requires of Germany.

http://buchanan.org/blog/nato-russia-collision-ahead-16176

NATO-Russia Collision Ahead?
Tuesday - June 23, 2015 at 12:26 am
By Patrick J. Buchanan

NATO, Was, Will Be A Failure.

In 1949, when NATO was founded, Dwight Eisenhower said, "If NATO exists in ten years it will have been a failure."

[From article]
NATO in 1949 had only 12 members, comprising Western Europe, Canadaand the United States. Its original mission was simple. According to the alliance's first secretary general, Lord Hastings Ismay, NATO was formed "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down."
[. . .]
It is said that Putin fears provoking NATO. More likely he will soon seek to wreck it by deliberately bullying weak and distant NATO members like Estonia, over whose independence Europeans are unlikely to start a war.
Third, the expansion from 12 to the current 28 members vastly complicated the alliance's responsibilities -- and vulnerabilities. To paraphrase Frederick the Great, protecting everything now means often protecting nothing. Turkey is now becoming obvious problem.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is in his 11th year of undermining Turkish democracy and Islamicizing the country.
[. . .]

One day soon we will wake up and NATO will have simply vanished with a whimper.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0814/hanson080714.php3

Will NATO end with a whimper?

By Victor Davis Hanson
Published August 7, 2014

Nationalism Not NATO Will Determine Boundaries

[From article]
If we can view with diffidence the drive by Scotland to secede from England, Catalonia to secede from Spain, Venice to secede from Italy, and Flanders to secede from Belgium, why would the secession of the Donbass from Ukraine be a problem for us, if done democratically?
Nationalism is the natural enemy of empires, and it seems on the rise almost everywhere.
[. . .]
A new world is coming. And while perhaps unwelcome news for the transnational elites championing such causes as climate change and battling global economic inequality, it is hard to see any great threat in all this to the true interests of the American people.

http://www.humanevents.com/2014/04/22/nationalism-not-nato-is-our-great-ally/

NATIONALISM, NOT NATO, IS OUR GREAT ALLY
By: Patrick J. Buchanan
4/22/2014 08:40 AM

US Military Only One Left

[From article]
"We are in the fifth month of the Libyan intervention that Barack Obama’s administration said would involve “days, not weeks,” an undertaking about which Prime Minister David Cameron was much more enthusiastic than Obama, who rarely mentions it.US Only Military

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/britain_last_war_KejxE7z1JpenNTZnAvFMkJ

Britain’s last war?
It soon won’t have much military left
George Will
New York Post
Last Updated: 4:11 AM, August 20, 2011
Posted: 9:32 PM, August 19, 2011

NATO At Harvard

Dwight Eisenhower observed in 1949 at its founding that if NATO exists in ten years it will have been a failure. Government institutions seldom die. NATO refuses to fade away.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/4/1/richardson-nuclear-libya-iop/

Bill Richardson Discusses Libya
By Monica M. Dodge,
Harvard CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
Published: Friday, April 01, 2011

Dwight Eisenhower on NATO

Goodwin questions Obama's references to NATO. But Dwight Eisenhower in 1949 said of NATO when it was founded, "If it exists in ten years it will have been a failure." NATO is one of many government creations that refuse to die. It won't even fade away. ABC News (Raleigh-Durham NC) announced that 2200 Marines and Sailors will be deployed to Libya.

http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=news%2Flocal&id=8039326
No ground troops?

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/perplexed_over_saber_prattling_KTGY1TLtuWye2zzfwUF0gP

Perplexed over saber 'prattling'
Michael Goodwin
New York Post
Last Updated: 2:52 AM, March 30, 2011
Posted: 1:24 AM, March 30, 2011

Eisenhower: NATO a Failure

Every biography of Dwight David Eisenhower quotes him saying in 1949, "If NATO exists in ten years it will have been a failure." (ARTHUR HERMAN, "The new threat to America: NATO," New York Post, June 14, 2010) Yet the beat goes on. Create a institution and government bureaucrats will find a way to keep their jobs. Some military professionals have made their entire careers within NATO.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_new_threat_to_america_nato_yEHmKUmEDa18HOEBQhD4aL

The new threat to America: NATO
By ARTHUR HERMAN
New York Post
Last Updated: 4:33 AM, June 14, 2010
Posted: 1:12 AM, June 14, 2010

Turkey, NATO and Israel

[From article]
"The most dramatic transformation in the Middle East since the fall of the shah is playing out before us. And we can't see behind the mask of the "plight of the Palestinians" (a key Obama administration concern).

In yesterday's confrontation, Israel behaved clumsily. The peace activists behaved savagely. The Turks behaved cynically. The world reacted predictably.

And Washington scratched its head"

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/turkish_blood_bath_Jean7yjj5Salz75brRSsMJ

Turkish (blood)bath

Ankara ambushes Israel at sea

Ralph Peters

New York Post

Last Updated: 10:52 AM, June 1, 2010

Posted: 12:21 AM, June 1, 2010

Russia Got NATO Codes After Polish Crash

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/may/13/inside-the-ring-86422687/

NATO code compromise

By Bill Gertz

INSIDE THE RING

May 13, 2010