Give Donald Trump credit for his ambition – he’s not only taking out America’s longstanding enemies, but he’s redefining the entire post-war world order. No biggie – he’s just changing everything about the world that we all grew up in. But we’re conservatives, so when you change something, you generally need to demonstrate a good reason to do so. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, and so on. But the old order was broken. Disastrously so. The behavior of the formerly great Western European powers during this existential struggle against the Muslim Marxist murder mullahs – the Iranian government is shockingly super-deep into faculty lounge campus communism (listen here) – only confirms it. Trump didn’t cause this reality; Trump saw this reality and acted, thereby becoming the most consequential president since Ronald Reagan.
Yes, his actions are destroying the world order as we knew it and grew up with, but not all destruction is bad. There’s creative destruction, where you clear out the deadwood and the inflammable underbrush that could fuel an inferno. That’s what Donald Trump’s doing. And that’s what the old version of NATO has been trying to stop. Remember the classic formulation of NATO’s role: keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down. Well, the Germans aren’t getting up anytime soon. They’re too busy hamstringing themselves. They’ve ensured that they can’t rely on their own energy generation by closing down their nukes and buying fuel from their enemies. And they’ve imported a third-world fifth column both out of existential guilt and the desperate need to make up for the birth dearth among the broken and exhausted people of their country. Germany is dying, and a majority of Germans believe it should. As for the Russians, until they invaded Ukraine, they had become merely a hypothetical threat since the end of the Cold War. That’s why the Bundeswehr was not too long ago practicing maneuvers with broomsticks; it couldn’t rustle up an armor division to save its life, literally.
NATO’s other role was to keep the Americans in, but also to keep them down. Yeah, they wanted America there, carrying the bulk of the defense of Western Europe, spending massive amounts of money on bases and infrastructure – those of us who were stationed in Germany are fully aware of how much American cash energized the local economy. But NATO membership implies multilateralism, that we Americans weren’t going to do anything big without our allies. And this gave our allies a tremendous ability to keep us in check. Remember that the entire post-war foreign policy system was not simply about keeping the Russians at bay. It was also designed to control the Americans. Allowing countries like Cuba to continue to plague us, enforcing international law that only serves to limit American action, and tying America to operating with allies all acted as a brake on the USA’s pursuit of its own interests. This was a feature for the globalists, not a bug.
But Trump wasn’t going to play that. Trump wasn’t interested in having America’s interests held in check by foreigners and by America’s own foreign policy establishment. Remember, their ideology eschews parochial patriotism. Their primary loyalty is not to the United States – why do you think Secretary of State George Shultz would bring a new ambassador, point to a globe, and ask them to find their country, with the right answer being the USA? Many of the Foggy Bottom types failed that test.
Opponents try to portray Trump as crazy or even treacherous because he refuses to adhere to the old world order, but Trump’s patriotism is actual patriotism. He sees foreign policy not as an academic exercise or a necessary effort to keep those dumb, greedy Americans under control, but as a business in which it is natural to use one’s strengths to one’s advantage. Just look at the tariffs issue – before he came along, did you realize just how unfavorable our tariff deals were to the United States? The New York City real estate developer can’t conceive of a reason why we would accept less than whatever we are strong enough to take.
One of the things that made the old world order work was that NATO could seize the moral high ground, in the sense that the Western powers were the good guys and that it was worth the costs imposed on the United States to protect like-minded democracies. But as their culturally, socially, and politically exhausted ruling classes clung to power long after change had become overdue, they lost that moral high ground. In Great Britain and Germany, you can be arrested for saying things. Why again are we promising to put blood and treasure on the line to defend countries that don’t recognize free speech from… a country that doesn’t recognize free speech?
Nor did it help that, for generations, the Europeans have blatantly failed to carry their weight within the alliance. America picked up the rucksack, and they picked up purses. The formerly great powers allowed their militaries to wither to such an extent that, even if they were inclined to assist the United States in the current conflict, they couldn’t meaningfully do so. The front-line states are different. The Finns and the Poles can fight, but they lack the luxury of frivolity that the UK, France, and Germany share. They look across the border and see Russians. The UK, France, and Germany invite in a bunch of Third World barbarians and tell themselves they are our moral superiors. We’ve been telling them for decades they’ve got to pick up the pace, that we can’t subsidize their Third World welfare states by allowing them to outsource their defense to our wallet. And they haven’t listened. In fact, they’ve laughed at us. That is, until Ukraine, and they expect us to fix that, too.
Shaming them are other allies that actually do perform. Look at Japan, which is picking up its responsibilities in the Western Pacific. And, of course, there’s Israel, which is actively integrated into the Iranian campaign. It’s fighting as an American peer. No NATO country can do that. No NATO country can even come close to doing that. Little Israel provides more raw combat power, not to mention technological, cyber, and intelligence dominance, than all the other countries of NATO combined. No other NATO country could pull off the great F-15 recovery mission; the ship on the upcoming Townhall cruise will generate more combat power alone than most NATO navies.
Of course, the straw that has really broken the camel’s back – and the camel’s back has suffered a compound fracture – was not just the Europeans’ refusal to affirmatively assist in the destruction of the mullah’s regime that will threaten Europe long before it threatens us. No, the Europeans actually refused to allow us to use their bases or overfly their airspace. We weren’t asking them to fight, just to get out of the way, and they couldn’t even do that. Oh, and if you don’t think Keith Starmer’s UK government told Lloyd’s of London to stop insuring ships going through the Strait of Hormuz to complicate America’s campaign, you are hopelessly naïve. Such allies are functionally indistinguishable from opponents.
Now, the Western NATO countries will tell you that they’re loyal allies. Why, they helped America when America came under attack 25 years ago. Yes, to an extent, they helped, and they did suffer casualties. We honor those heroes. But let’s not fool ourselves that most of the NATO countries were all-in on the fight (even in Kosovo, trying to get the Europeans to do something was a challenge). We invoked Article 5, and they responded. Thanks. They met their minimum obligation back then. But we’re talking about their obligation now. It’s not one and done. When you’re in alliance, your obligations continue. And the major Western NATO powers have failed to meet theirs in even the most minimal way by simply letting us fly over their countries and refuel on our joint bases. It’s not exactly a confidence builder that they’ll be there if the balloon goes up with China. It doesn’t help that many of leaders seem eager to buddy up to the Chi Coms.
One of the arguments we get from the Euros is that we can’t very well expect them to do their part after Trump has been so mean to them. Why Trump did this, and Trump said that, and blah blah blah. Muh Greenland!
Excuse me?
Stop.
They are not being asked to do anything for Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is not calling them to his colors.
They are being asked to fulfill their obligations to the United States of America.
The United States of America is calling them to our colors.
Donald Trump is the elected president of the United States.
The European powers do not get a say in who we elect president.
Their obligations don’t stop if they disapprove of our choice of chief executive.
Is there some sort of hurt feelings exception to the obligations of alliance?
Who the hell do these pipsqueaks think they are?
These pipsqueaks ought to think they are in trouble, and they need to think very carefully about their choices because they are running out of friends. On the America First side, many of us – including guys like me with a NATO medal – have long been skeptical of the alliance, but many traditional Republicans have stood with it and argued for its preservation. That’s ending. When you have traditional Republican hawks like Hugh Hewitt and Lindsey Graham stating outright that it appears NATO in its present form has outlived its usefulness, that is a sea change in the American political system. You aren’t coming back from that.
It’s very clear that NATO cannot go on as it was before. But don’t mourn the fact that things must change because things always change over time. NATO has endured in its present form for almost a century. That’s a long time for any paradigm to persist. But instead of mourning its passing, or even worse, trying to use heroic measures to resuscitate it so it can linger on pointlessly a bit longer, we should embrace the reality that NATO must change.
But we also need to appreciate the fact that NATO evolving is just one of the changes to the global order. Most of our old enemies are going to be gone. Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran are all going to be off the board. We will be free to face China with nearly the full weight of our power, especially once we inevitably tell the Europeans that Russia and Vladimir Putin – you know, the guy making war on Ukraine who our allies subsidize by buying oil from him – is their problem.
We will inevitably be strengthening our new alliances with allies who provide a net benefit to America – the frontline NATO nations, Japan, the Philippines, the Gulf states, Israel (Hardest Hit: The podcast cretins), and maybe even India. The UK, France, Germany, Spain, and the increasingly ridiculous Canada are becoming irrelevant to us. This is the result of choices. By choosing Donald Trump, America has chosen to put America first, and by abandoning America, the formerly great powers have chosen to become mere afterthoughts.
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