If Donald Trump’s candidacy achieves nothing else, it will have prompted more Americans to ask why the US must lead a confederated empire. From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:
A recent report published in Foreign Policy magazine, a bastion of the internationalist Establishment, illustrates quite neatly how the anti-interventionist cause is making big gains – and how to effect real change in American foreign policy. The headline reads: “Senators Slam NATO ‘Free Riders’ in Closed Door Session With Secretary General,” and the story went on to relate how GOP Senators are suddenly complaining about how and why the burden of NATO falls largely on Uncle Sam’s sagging shoulders:
“For under an hour, senators grilled [NATO Secretary General Jens] Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway, about why only five members of the 28-nation club spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense, the official amount NATO recommends each nation to set aside. Some expressed particular dissatisfaction with Germany, the fourth largest economy in the world, which does not meet the 2 percent threshold.”
Although the article claimed that Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tennessee) “and other US officials” have “blasted” our feckless allies for years over this imbalance, this is the first time we’ve heard about it. Why is that? Well, it’s because the Republican frontrunner, one Donald J. Trump, is making an issue of it, and even suggesting that NATO, which he says is “obsolete,” is a relic of the cold war that ought to be entirely abandoned.
This has the foreign policy Establishment in a panic, with legions of “experts” rising up to denounce Trump’s heresy as misguided, absurd, and – of course! – “isolationist.” Yet the politicians can’t afford to be so dismissive: after all, they have to listen to their constituents, at least to some extent. And it’s quite telling what Sen. Corker – who has warned the “Never Trump” crowd to back off – had to say to Stoltenberg:
“I did mention to him that there’s a populism that is taking place within our country right now, both sides of the aisle. The American people know that we are a nation spending way beyond our means and when our European counterparts are not honoring their obligations as they should, at some point, there’s going to be a breaking point.”
Ah yes, the “breaking point” – we’ve been waiting for it for, lo these many years, and finally – finally! – it looks like it’s happening. And we owe it all to an unlikely figure, a New York real estate mogul who has never run for office and whose public persona is a cross between a reality TV star and P. T. Barnum. Nobody – including myself – predicted the effect he would have on the presidential race, and, more importantly, on the political discourse in this country. Due to Trump’s astounding rise, even the haughty mandarins in the US Senate are being forced to pay attention and give voice to their usually very muted criticism of an institution that is the linchpin of our internationalist foreign policy. As Foreign Policy puts it:
“Donald Trump has spent much of his campaign deriding NATO allies for ‘ripping off’ the American taxpayer and failing to contribute to the world’s most powerful military alliance. But on Wednesday, his fellow Republicans joined the chorus during a closed-door meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Capitol Hill, according to sources inside the room.”
Corker claims to have raised the issue “in Munich, I have expressed this in Davos, I have expressed this is every forum where Europeans are listening.” Now he is finally forced to express it in a forum where Americans are listening – and that is the key point.
Support for our interventionist foreign policy has never extended much beyond the Washington Beltway. It’s a common complaint among the wonkish “experts” who inhabit the thinktanks along the Potomac that the average American doesn’t have a passport, doesn’t care about what happens overseas unless it impacts them directly, and is basically one of those dreaded “isolationists.”
To continue reading: The Revolt Against NATO
