His parochial obsessions are going to get us all killed
There has been some serious push back on social media to the belief that MAGA peacenik Donald Trump could start WWIII from both the right and the left. Apparently, Joe Biden is a violent warmonger for providing material support to America’s traditional allies while Donald Trump is a dove because he only oversaw a war with American troops on the ground in Afghanistan and ramped up the drone war to unprecedented heights throughout the world. But whatever. Facts aren’t really relevant at the moment. We’re all about feelings and vibes and because Trump has indoctrinated massive numbers of Americans with the lie that the whole world respected and feared him so much that they all bowed down to him and we have world peace for the first time in history. And yes, a number of lefties are similarly deluded about Trump because they haven’t closely observed what he is or what he has planned.
If Donald Trump wins a second term in the White House in November, NATO may fall apart, a recent wargame found.
As a presidential candidate, Trump has threatened to quit NATO unless European allies contribute more, and should he carry it out Europe may decide to go it alone on defense, the game suggests. “A US policy of frustrating NATO has the potential to cause the alliance to collapse, with the EU as a candidate for eventually replacing NATO’s ultimate function — defending Europe from Russia,” wrote Finley Grimble, the British defense expert who designed and ran the game.
The US doesn’t have to withdraw from NATO to imperil the 75-year-old alliance. Technically, the US is barred from leaving NATO after Congress voted in 2023 to prohibit withdrawal without congressional approval.
But the game showed how Trump — the presumptive Republican presidential nominee who said on the campaign trail that he’d encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” with NATO allies who spend too little on their militaries — could undermine NATO simply by doing as little as possible to support the alliance. “What Donald Trump can do is just really hollow out what NATO does,” Grimble told Business Insider. “He doesn’t need to leave NATO to ruin it. He can ruin it from within.”
Now maybe you think that NATO isn’t important anyway and who really cares if this happens? Well, we just spent almost an entire century, from 1917 to 1989 fighting wars in Europe, both hot and cold. That really wasn’t that long ago in the great scheme of things and the residual effects of those wars are still reverberating in Ukraine and Israel where hot wars are raging. It’s really not a great idea to let Europe turn into chaos. That doesn’t end well.
And chaos is exactly what happens in the game when the fictional Trump takes office in January 2025.
The new administration immediately attempts to broker a peace deal — without European help — between Ukraine and Russia. After the mediation fails, Trump slashes aid to Ukraine.
It is the first domino to fall. Trump then drastically reduces US participation in NATO, including redeployment of 50 percent of American military assets in Europe, where more than 100,000 US troops are based, to the Indo-Pacific theater. The Trump administration also institutes a new policy called “dormancy.” This includes a variety of go-slow tactics, such as less US participation in NATO exercises. A particularly damaging move is to bar the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) — the second-highest military position in NATO, and always a US officer — from acting without prior consultation with Washington.
“Ultimately, SACEUR is answerable to the president of the United States,” said Grimble. “So he [SACEUR] can start slowing things down, or prevent things from happening. The US can just take the funding from NATO programs and they will collapse.”
The article goes into all the possible scenarios that could result and the conclusion is chilling:
By the end of the game, the effects of a US pullback from NATO are global. China realizes that the US has really shifted its focus from Europe to the Pacific, which deters Beijing from invading Taiwan. Yet this doesn’t reassure Japan, Australia and South Korea — US allies whose forces and bases are essential to efforts to counter China — which worry that Trump might change his mind and abandon them too. Iran becomes emboldened to assert its power in the Middle East, which spurs an arms race with Saudi Arabia.
Do we really need this? To be sure, this is not a prediction but rather an experiment to game out the possibilities. It sure sounds probable to me.
It’s one thing to re-evaluate America’s role in the world in light of various changing circumstances. I don’t think anyone argues with that. But if we have an emboldened white, Christian nationalist US leadership, led by a narcissistic imbecile who still has no clue what he’s doing so the only thing he can do is babble on about Europe “taking advantage” and not “paying its dues” we will have chaos. And that’s the last thing anyone should want in a nuclear world.
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