Who needs NATO?

More like: who needs defence against America and Israel?

Donald Trump says that America doesn’t need NATO. So, we need to ask: who does?

Because of the fact that we have had such Military Success, we no longer ‘need,’ or desire, the Nato Countries’ assistance _ WE NEVER DID! Likewise, Japan, Australia, or South Korea.

Donald Trump, President of America

Well, whether he needs them or not, he’s getting British minesweepers and 2,000 Japanese commandos. When you give a baby back the rattle he has thrown out of his pram, it’s not because you want to placate the baby. It’s because you have nowhere else to put the rattle. I really do hope that Japan has nothing else to do with 2,000 of its citizens but to put them in mortal danger in an attempt to placate a foreign aggressor who has already declared his implacability. Japan and Britain are hereby making plain that they support illegal wars of aggression.

Trump has also wiped his hands of NATO in other statements, in which he expresses his disgust at their ingratitude: the billions that America poured over the years into Britain’s defence. Oh, Starmer how couldst thou?!—

I am clear from this misdeed of Starmer’s,
No more my king, for he dishonours me,
But most himself, if he could see his shame.

And am I guerdon’d at the last with shame?
Shame on himself! for my desert is honour:
And to repair my honour lost for him,
I here renounce him and return to Bibi.

With apologies to Shakespeare: Henry VI Part III, the Earl of Warwick learns of the Duke of York’s perfidy!

One does wonder at the rank stupidity of America since World War II at expending such outlays and getting so little in return: just refusals to hand over sovereign territory and refusals to help America in its unprovoked wars of aggression. Volodomyr Zelenskyy in fact put it candidly to the President and his Vice President at the White House when he pointed out that Ukraine and Russia are separated by a black line on a map, whereas the U.S. is separated from its foes by vast oceans. Why, then, oh, why the vast expenditure on Europe? Don’t tell me that it really was nothing more than a vast pyramid scheme to flog armaments all that time?

NATO does not include Austria, Cyprus, Ireland or Malta, which the European Union does. This raises questions as to why Cyprus, the base for key British operations in the Near East isn’t itself protected under the panoply of NATO; how it comes that West Germany was obliged to join NATO as part of its post-war rehabilitation, but Austria wasn’t, and yet got a peace treaty, which Germany didn’t; how come an island nation that is so precariously situated in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea as to have been awarded a George Cross for its valour in withstanding an aerial pummelling from Nazi Germany stands unprotected and vulnerable to the onslaught of mighty money-launderers; and how it comes that the nation that forms the western extremity to the North Atlantic coast should not itself be a member of the North Atlantic Treaty. The answers are all individual to the nations in question, but they do form a collective answer to Mr Trump’s question of Who needs NATO?: clearly, they don’t.

Actually within the confines of NATO is another country, however; one that represents 2 per cent of the EU’s population and 1.1 per cent of its budget and yet is reneguing on a deal to help Ukraine that was set down unanimously last December and is pally to an uncomfortable degree with the Russian leadership at a time when Ukraine is itself seeking EU membership: Hungary. Hungary is in NATO and, under Mr Orbàn’s leadership, seems to wish more that it wasn’t, despite the veneer of bromance between him and Mr Trump. The two of them seemingly have at least one big thing in common now: neither of them needs NATO.

The European Union itself has been struggling for some time to cobble together a joint defence strategy and the only thing its seems to have produced on multiple occasions is a conclusion that it isn’t by far prepared to defend itself, won’t be for some years to come, and could very well do without Hungary in its midst in order to make some progress towards its desired defence posture. It was, interestingly enough, the current NATO secretary-general, Mark Rutte, who as Dutch prime minister asked a plenary session of the European Commission whether there wasn’t some mechanism for turfing Hungary out of the EU. Maybe he’s working on a plan to turf Hungary out of NATO, now he has somewhat more influence in that body.

What the refusals thus far —qualified as they might be—by NATO members to come to the assistance of the floundering American/Israeli war against Iran perhaps betoken more than Mr Trump appreciates, is that NATO is not just a military resource for members to dip into every time they end up in armed conflict with some other party, like a bowl of peanuts on the counter of a bar, whose purpose is to sharpen the thirst of the patrons and make them order an extra beer or two. Nor is it a corps of stretcher-bearers to help you limp off the battlefield into which you have so stoically charged without first consulting them. He may also perhaps appreciate that Israel is not exactly a NATO member and that joint adventures such as these between a NATO member and a non-NATO member call for a far more delicate appraisal of whether the exigencies of article 5 are in fact met. There are no plus-ones at the NATO party, sad to say.

So, with America’s defensive oceans, some questionable commitment to NATO’s raison d’être (of protection from the east) in Hungary coupled to the antipathy of the NATO secretary-general towards that country, and the desire within the rest of the EU to find a common defence strategy fit for Europe, the answer to who needs NATO would appear at the moment to be: Canada.

I wonder whether Trump will attempt to strong-arm Brussels into attacking Cuba later this year? If it isn’t already, when he does NATO will be finished.