A Rolling Stone report detailing Donald Trump’s alleged plan for NATO if he wins the White House next year is making political experts greatly concerned.
“Trump and his team are actively planning to pull the United States out of NATO — or, barring that, kneecap the collective defense provisions at the heart of the alliance,” writes Rolling Stone editor-in-chief Noah Shachtman.
“As this, and the damning tapes of Trump/Pratt conversation show, Donald Trump is the biggest internal threat to America’s national security we have had since the Civil War,” warns political scientist Norman Ornstein of The Atlantic, pointing to the Rolling Stone piece and the revelations about Trump’s remarks to an Australian national in which he allegedly divulged U.S. nuclear submarine secrets.
“Donald Trump wanted to pull the United States out of NATO during his first term, but was repeatedly talked out of it by senior administration officials,” Rolling Stone reports. “For a possible second term in the White House, the 2024 Republican presidential frontrunner is already discussing how he could actually get it done, if his demands aren’t met by NATO. He and his policy-wonk allies are also gaming out how he could dramatically wind down American involvement to merely a ‘standby’ position in NATO, in Trump’s own words.”
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“Trump, the sources say, has continued to express an openness to pulling the U.S. out of NATO altogether. However, Trump has suggested that this could be averted if the alliance — which Trump once famously called ‘obsolete’ — gives in to his newest demands. This would include his desires for non-American members to further and steeply increase their defense spending, and for a reevaluation of the bedrock principle that an attack on one member is tantamount to an attack on all.”
Former Republican and former GOP Congressman Joe Walsh notes, “This is exactly what Trump’s boss, Putin, wants.”
Veteran GOP political strategist Mike Madrid writes: “This is why Russia didn’t invade Ukraine during Trumps Presidency. You don’t invade when your puppet is giving you everything you want from the inside.”
Historian and Global Politics Associate Professor at University College London, Brian Klass warns, “This would be an unimaginable blow to the lynchpin of global security.”
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The Biden campaign weighed in, with Director of Rapid Response Ammar Moussa writing: “Everything about a potential second Donald Trump term points towards a less safe, more chaotic world, abandoning our allies and emboldening our adversaries.”
“We cannot allow this imbecile anywhere near the oval office again,” warns former CIA analyst Gail Helt, now the director of King University’s King Institute of Security and Intelligence Studies. “America first will mean America alone.”
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