I read the transcript. It actually starts with President Trump talking about getting ukraine, israel to accept loans rather than just assistance money. His idea was that if they ever turn on us, that we can then ask for the loan back. That led him into discussing getting deadbeat nato nations to pay their promised shares of nato funding.
Should we fund an auto accident, if we’re a car insurance company, and a car owner hasn’t paid their bill in a while? I kind of doubt it.
Should we spend blood and treasure defending a nato deadbeat that refuses to participate in defending itself? Trump said, in his sarcastic way, not really.
The argument over how hard to push Europe to pay for its own defense will become moot before long, given our present “leaders”’ unwillingness to drastically cut back spending. We will soon reach a point where we will simply not be able to afford to defend a broad array of other nations and still retain the capacity for our own defense. So it’s in Europe’s best interest, as well as our own, to push them to stand on their own sooner rather than later. And if that requires a little use of a cattle prod to get them moving, then so what? Fear tends to focus the mind, and I think the self-indulgent Eurotrash, who for far too long have let us pay for their defense while they redirected those funds into their extravagant welfare states, definitely will need serious prodding to wake them up. It’s either that, or we just keep kicking that can down the road, and one day soon Europe suddenly wakes up to an America that has no choice but to immediately and without warning cut them loose.
Trump is using the specter of abandoning them to Russia’s tender mercies to shock them back to reality. I think this is brilliant and it also has a probably much more important benefit: Threatening to stop protecting “allies” who take our services for granted just might stop current efforts to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency dead in their tracks. At the end of the day, the “full faith and credit” of the United States that backs all those dollars really just means our willingness to act as the global police, and to send our military to protect a number of countries that gladly accept that protection while simultaneously stabbing us in the back everyday. Might be a good idea to remind those alleged “allies” as well that there are wolves at their door, and if they continue to plot against our interests we will just remove our protection and see how they fare fighting the wolves on their own.
The world is full of scheming scumbags who constantly plot to undermine us, no less among our vaunted European “allies” than in obvious slime pits like Saudi Arabia, as just one example. The best way to deal with scumbags is to keep them on a short leash, and a little fear is sometimes a necessary motivator. Anything less is just seen as weakness by the scumbags, and leads to them exploiting their relationship with the U.S. for their own selfish purposes.
We can be used, or we can be respected, but not both. We had better start choosing wisely.