Posted on 03/26/2017 8:16:58 AM PDT by nhwingut
According to the UK Independent, President Trump reportedly handed Angela Merkel an invoice for $300bn, with interest included, to cover Germany's NATO fees.
I don’t accept the GDP measure as a valid measure other than in the context of the European role of NATO spending and ONLY with respect to NATO - not U.S. global military expenses.
In that regard, does the U.S. spend 2% of GDP ON NATO? No it doesn’t.
The rest (what the U.S. spends) is by U.S. policy by U.S. choices, in Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere. We are not asking Korea and Japan to spend enough to help offset what we spend on NATO, and asking NATO members to spend a % of GDP equal to ours (we don’t do that yet - only 2%, and we spend 3.6%) suggests NATO members should be helping to offset what we are spending, by out choice, in Asia and elsewhere.
If you want to make it a “U.S. global alliance” matter, as far as % of GDP each member of the alliance should spend, then you need to bring our Asian and other allies into NATO, which also would expand our European allies treaty commitment to those allies as well. That is never going to happen.
The U.S. and NATO should accept a target defense spending as a % GDP, but it - that % - should be related to NATO defense expenditures of NATO member nations, including the U.S., in Europe.
It cannot work - the U.S. asking NATO members to match U.S. GDP% in defense spending, unless the global defense commitments are going to match as well. They’re not. Therefore Europe is never going to spend as much of a % on defense as does the U.S., and neither is Japan or Korea. It is not going to happen.
If the U.S. wants only to complain about the money, and was so %^$# upset that no one ally spends a % of GDP on defense as much as we do, we could leave NATO and let Japan and South Korea deal with North Korea and China. I think we’d be back in a WWI/WWII situation in both arenas before long if we did that, and with the massive sudden build-back-up it would require as well.
Yes, and we also paid in the blood of many, many fine young men.
I really hope this is true.
Go Trump!
WINNING
That’s not fair; they need that for their refugee invasion. </sarc>
There are times, like when looking at your cartoon, that I feel immense sadness at the apparently inevitable decline of the west in Europe. Like the Roman Empire, it fell into decadence and a dependence on imported labor from foreign cultures while they enjoyed their creature comforts. Then their loyal “friends” the barbarians that populated their armies and ran their homes for them turned on them. And it all collapsed rapidly. I fear that we are standing at the dawn of a new dark age where an emergent dominant culture rises which rejects science, technology, reason and basic Judaeo-Christian values of charity, tolerance, and kindness are simply gone. Cherished ancient monuments obliterated, books burned, women in chains, schools closed, cathedrals torn down, violence and death everywhere; that’s the future of Europe if they don’t turn away these muslim hordes. And yet they seem to not want to.
now that Germany is being sold out to the Islamic invaders,
the country’s productivity will necessarily nose-dive, seriously fall down
soon, they may be unable to pay even a tenth of this amount
if there’s to be any collecting, now’s the time
we can use the $ to build a wall around Germany (and France, etc.) to keep the IslamoNazi invaders away from UK, Hungary, CZ, Russia etc.
They deserve it. Especially as they have assumed the role of world’s richest youth hostel for touring jihadis.
Well said.
A thoughtful summary.
Thanks for posting it.
Well I would be 1000% for,us but that is essentially surrendering france and britains nukes to the muslim scum and we cannot ever make it that easy for muslims to get nukes.
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