The latest track in the NYT/WP Greatest Hit's album. Every specific in that article was from the 2018 NATO summit & before.seacoaster wrote:Trump discussing withdrawing from NATO?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/us/p ... trump.html
"The president has repeatedly and publicly challenged or withdrawn from a number of military and economic partnerships, from the Paris climate accord to an Asia-Pacific trade pact. He has questioned the United States’ military alliance with South Korea and Japan, and he has announced a withdrawal of American troops from Syria without first consulting allies in the American-led coalition to defeat the Islamic State.
NATO had planned to hold a leaders meeting in Washington to mark its 70th anniversary in April, akin to the 50-year celebration that was hosted by President Bill Clinton in 1999. But this year’s meeting has been downgraded to a foreign ministers gathering, as some diplomats feared that Mr. Trump could use a Washington summit meeting to renew his attacks on the alliance.
Leaders are now scheduled to meet at the end of 2019, but not in Washington.
Mr. Trump’s threats to withdraw had sent officials scrambling to prevent the annual gathering of NATO leaders in Brussels last July from turning into a disaster.
Senior national security officials had already pushed the military alliance’s ambassadors to complete a formal agreement on several NATO goals — including shared defenses against Russia — before the summit meeting even began, to shield it from Mr. Trump.
But Mr. Trump upended the proceedings anyway. One meeting, on July 12, was ostensibly supposed to be about Ukraine and Georgia — two non-NATO members with aspirations to join the alliance.
Accepted protocol dictates that alliance members do not discuss internal business in front of nonmembers. But as is frequently the case, Mr. Trump did not adhere to the established norms, according to several American and European officials who were in the room.
He complained that European governments were not spending enough on the shared costs of defense, leaving the United States to carry an outsize burden. He expressed frustration that European leaders would not, on the spot, pledge to spend more. And he appeared not to grasp the details when several tried to explain to him that spending levels were set by parliaments in individual countries, the American and European officials said.
Then, at another leaders gathering at the same summit meeting, Mr. Trump appeared to be taken by surprise by Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general.
Backing Mr. Trump’s position, Mr. Stoltenberg pushed allies to increase their spending and praised the United States for leading by example — including by increasing its military spending in Europe. At that, according to one official who was in the room, Mr. Trump whipped his head around and glared at American officials behind him, surprised by Mr. Stoltenberg’s remarks and betraying ignorance of his administration’s own spending plans.
Mr. Trump appeared especially annoyed, officials in the meeting said, with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and her country’s military spending of 1 percent of its gross domestic product."
So we could save a few bucks.
What came out of that summit & what NATO operations has the US lead since ?
No mention of --
-- the US sending a carrier strike group through the GIUK gap above the Arctic Circle into the North Sea
-- the US sending an expeditionary strike group to put a Marine Battalion ashore in Iceland, then Norway, as part of a large scale NATO war game.
-- joint carrier/airwing integrated crossdeck deployments involving US/UK/France
-- USN ops in the Black Sea, under USAF air cover from Romanian air base.
-- Mattis's 30x30x30 strategy.
-- site surveys in Poland for "Ft Trump" to host a permanently based US heavy Armored Division (w/ families).
-- Rather than DC, Berlin is the logical location to celebrate NATO's 70th Anniversary, ...or Warsaw, if it would be too militaristic for the Germans.
The NYT-WP-MSNBC-WP resistance propaganda machine is pulling out all stops & rehashing old stories, in anticipation of Mueller's report.
