The Star Tribune (Minneapolis, Minn.) on how Trump’s wrong about need for NATO:

To mark the 75th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization this week, a statue of former President Harry Truman is being installed at the U.S. ambassador to NATO’S residence in Brussels. It’s a fitting tribute. Truman was commander in chief when the U.S. became a founding member of NATO, and the transatlantic alliance shares many of the traits that defined him, including a resolute, responsible commitment to collective defense.

Defense of territory, to be sure. But also something even more profound, as defined by Dwight Eisenhower, ... who succeeded Truman. “We do not keep security establishments merely to defend property or territory or rights abroad or at sea,” Eisenhower said in 1954. “We keep the security forces to defend a way of life.”

The support from successive presidents, one a Democrat and the other Republican, had endured on a bipartisan basis through subsequent generations. Until, that is, the presidency of Donald Trump, who as a candidate called the alliance “obsolete.” More recently, at a campaign rally, Trump told the crowd that “one of the presidents of a big (NATO) country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’ I said, ‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent? … No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.’”

A statement like that undermines NATO’S deterrence effect “by creating a lot of uncertainty in the minds of our allies and maybe giving false hopes to a country like Russia,” Thomas Hanson, diplomat-in-residence at the University of Minnesota Duluth, told an editorial writer.

Hanson, a former Foreign Service officer and former director for NATO and European Affairs at the Atlantic Council, said that NATO was “essential during the Cold War when there were only 12 members as a defensive alliance holding off the Soviet Union during the period of containment, and it’s as important as ever because with the end of the Cold War it redefined itself and began to take on missions beyond the original intent.”

Including in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, when the U.S. became the first and only NATO nation to invoke the collectivedefense mechanism known as Article 5. America’s allies were there for us then, and we should be there for them in the future.

That’s the unambiguous intent of President Joe Biden, who has correctly identified the fundamental struggle of this era as one of democracy vs. autocracy . ...