Alarm as Trump threatens NATO exit
Alarm and condemnation erupted from European capitals, the White House and leaders of Donald Trump’s own party after the Republican presidential nominee suggested the United States might abandon its NATO military commitments if he were elected president.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who backed Trump at the party’s national convention only two days earlier, said he totally disagreed with the statement but was willing to ‘‘chalk it up to a rookie mistake’’.
McConnell called NATO ‘‘the most successful military alliance in the history of the world,’’ in a Facebook interview with The New York Times.
In Brussels, NATO SecretaryGeneral Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance agreement was crystal clear: ‘‘We defend each other.’’
‘‘I will not interfere in the US election campaign,’’ Stoltenberg said. But he pointedly added, ‘‘Two world wars have shown that peace in Europe is also important for the security of the United States.’’
White House spokesman Josh Earnest noted that every president since World War II has supported the NATO agreement. ‘‘The cornerstone of that alliance is the pledge that all of the allies have made to mutual self-defence,’’ the White House spokesman said. ‘‘The US commitment to that pledge is ironclad.’’
Indeed, Trump’s suggestion yesterday, would upend decades of American foreign policy and rock the security structures that have underpinned European and global stability since the end of World War II.
Trump said he would review allies’ financial contributions — in this case, those from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — before acting under NATO’s mutual defence clause, if any of the countries were attacked by Russia. Various US administrations have complained, often bitterly, that many NATO members do not foot their share of the alliance’s bills.
The US accounts for more than 70 per cent of all NATO defence spending and only four other allies — Britain, Estonia, Greece and Poland — meet the minimum 2 per cent of gross domestic product spending on defense that NATO requires. But Trump’s floating of the idea that the spending target would be a prerequisite for the US to defend a NATO ally was an abrupt break from longstanding American policy.
Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves tweeted that his country was one of the few to meet the minimum defence expenditure and noted pointedly that Estonia ‘‘fought, with no caveats’’ on behalf of the US in Afghanistan.
A bitter foe within Trump’s own party, Senator Lindsey Gra- ham of South Carolina, said: ‘‘I’m 100 per cent certain how Russian President (Vladimir) Putin feels — he’s a very happy man.’’
Some Republicans opposed to Trump have indeed sought to cast him as pro-Putin, a position that would put him at odds with both Republican and Democratic foreign policy and also diverge from the current party platform.
Hillary Clinton’s senior campaign policy adviser Jake Sullivan said the statements showed Trump was ‘‘temperamentally unfit and fundamentally ill-prepared to be our commander in chief. The president is supposed to be the leader of the free world. Donald Trump apparently doesn’t even believe in the free world.’’