If Trump's purpose was to disunite NATO, he is succeeding wonderfully, so far.
If conservatives believe that we are safer with NATO in disarray and even with America withdrawn, then you must believe that America is safer in an isolated, defensive posture that in no way preserves its existence except by nuclear deterrence or, God forbid, nuclear war.
If we think that America is safer as a citadel behind two oceans that dominates the West from Greenland to the Panama Canal, we should be unsettled by the fact that we have very short memories.
Our memories evidently do not extend to the precarious state of our national security in the isolationist days leading up to Pearl Harbor.
Our memories evidently do not extend to more recent time when we came to within an ace of being incinerated in the Cuban missile crisis.
Our memories evidently do not extend to an even more recent time when we were nearly incinerated by a bizarre misjudgment of the Soviet Navy that only by the narrowest chance was aborted from launching nuclear attack on the United States by a loan Soviet officer.
To his credit, Donald Trump clearly remembers these things and is determined to act prudently. Beyond steps listed above he seeks to end the Ukraine war. More than merely achieving a cease-fire, his imagination goes beyond that to the reintegration of Russia into the list a civilized nations. I hope he succeeds. But at the cost of NATO? At the cost of Europe? Even if he succeeds now in bringing Russia to a civilized condition, Trump has only 3+ years left to monitor things, after that? The deluge? Who will manage China? Can we do so from citadel America?
At this moment and for the foreseeable future Russia is a demoralized, corrupt and a week conventional military force. Putin's economy has been concentrated into war production threatening to crash the entire Russian economy. His days of distorting the economy and consigning untold young Russian men to death and dismemberment are coming to a close, and Putin himself must certainly recognize the threat to his power and, indeed, to his life.
Therefore, Russia poses no realistic conventional threat to any other NATO country for many years. But Russia remains perhaps the world's most powerful nuclear threat with China hard on its heels.
Let's go back down memory lane one more time. Do you recall 1980s when millions of Europeans (and not a few leftist Americans) filled the streets, especially the streets of Germany, in protest against President Reagan's installation of missiles in Europe?
In the four decades since, both Europe and America have changed the very essence of their identity with unbridled immigration of alien cultures and worldviews reinforcing a general drift leftward resulting in engrossing power of the state at the expense of essential human rights of the kind expressed in our Bill of Rights. In short, Europe and America under the influence of the 1619 movement, under the influence of woke madness and distorted by alien immigration, are even less likely to muster the grit to face up to Pearl Harbor or to another Cuban missile crisis.
China will not conquer America by sending its Marines to storm the beaches of San Diego, rather it's tentacles will remorselessly constrict closer and closer to our citadel until threat of nuclear annihilation causes our own demoralized civil populace to demand peace at any price.
They will be able to say that we have no allies in the world. They will be able to say we have no trade partners so our economy has shrunk, they will be able to say that we have no affinity either culturally, philosophically or militarily with Europe. They will say the whole world is against us, we are alone and, besides, our system is not worth defending.
China will not conquer us, it will simply absorb us.
But we will surely have taught those euro weenies a lesson they won't forget.
