Trump: Don’t pay? Russia can do whatever it wants to a NATO member

Trump visited Russia in the early 80s and when he came back, he took out $100k in newspaper ads proclaiming that the US should pull out of NATO and Europe should pay for their own defense.

 

This is what Reagan said regarding the role of NATO. The difference between Reagan and Trump is that Reagan understood the concept of a mutual defense treaty and its importance in preserving peace. To Trump who thinks strictly in transactional terms and has the prospective of an organized crime boss it's a protection agreement in which all parties have to participate and the extent of their participation is determined by the boss of all bosses.
President Ronald Reagan's Address to the Citizens of Western Europe

The Atlantic alliance is the core of America's foreign policy and of America's own security. Preservation of a peaceful, free, and democratic Europe is essential to the preservation of a peaceful, free, and democratic United States. If our fellow democracies are not secure, we cannot be secure. If you are threatened, we're threatened. If you're not at peace, we cannot be at peace. An attack on you is an attack on us. This is not simply a matter of treaty language, important as treaty language is. It is an enduring reality -- as enduring as the reality that a threat to the security of the State of Maine or New York or California is a threat to the security of all 50 American States. Simply put: An attack on Munich is the same as an attack on Chicago.

As Western Europe, with help from our Marshall plan, rebuilt, all our nations began to face the nature of the Soviet threat to the democracies. And so, beginning with the Brussels treaty in 1948, which established the Western European Union, and then the North Atlantic treaty 1 year later, which included Canada and the United States as well as other European nations, we drew together for our common safety and peace. As President Harry Truman said when he signed the North Atlantic treaty: Through this partnership "we seek to establish freedom from aggression and from the use of force in the North Atlantic community.'' And he added: "This is the area which has been at the heart of the last two world conflicts. To protect this area against war will be a long step toward permanent peace in the whole world.''

Well, peace has been the alliance's goal, the purpose of its forces and its strategies. And for almost 40 years, peace has been its achievement -- an unprecedented period of European peace in which we in the democracies have lived in freedom and prospered. NATO's strategy for peace has always been simple: Prevent aggression before it starts. Be strong enough, be determined enough so that no adversary would think even for a moment that war might pay.​

While Putin's Russia is a ghost of the former Soviet Union mentioned by Reagan, Putin has made no secret of his desire a resurrect a new version of the Soviet/Russian empire keeping in mind that Vladimir described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.

Said it before the Trump cult's slogan "Make America Great Again" is the ultimate oxymoron. America's greatness throughout the second half of the 20th Century was its willingness to accept leadership of the "free world". Trump's threat to withdraw from NATO and his apparent encouragement of aggression by Putin is another indication that an America led by Donald Trump would not be the exceptional country that it once was. Maybe the real slogan should be "Make American Not So Great Now" since the Orange One has apparently no desire to make American great.

 

Thanks. I hadn’t heard of this book. Seems to be about a very important subject and is pretty well regarded overall. There are a few criticisms that it just pushes a liberal narrative. Did you get any sense of that?