If the president’s problem with NATO was only about money—about more equitable “burden-sharing” among allies, as Trump’s NATO ambassador told reporters in a recent briefing—he might have refrained from repeatedly exaggerating the imbalances in NATO contributions. He might have claimed victory this week in Brussels for spurring Canada and NATO’s European members to commit to an additional $266 billion in military spending by 2024, even if that leaves some countries short of the target 2 percent of GDP. Or he might have stuck to the 2-percent goal in Brussels, rather than abruptly informing stunned European leaders that he would now like them to spend 4 percent of their GDP on defense—more than the United States itself presently devotes to its military. [...]
As Trump seems to see it, allies—with their free-trade deals and military alliances and unending expectations of preferential treatment—tie down the United States, Gulliver-like, and infringe on its sovereignty. They cynically take advantage of their superpower patron while cloaking their naked self-interest in the high-minded language of multilateralism and shared interests. They flourish by exploiting America’s largesse and sapping the United States of its strength. (Hence, perhaps, why Trump is blasting Germany for buying gas from Russia—and not from the energy-rich United States—while depending on the United States to defend it from Russia.) Trump’s gripes about the “$151 Billion trade deficit” with the European Union or the U.S. spending “at least 70 percent for NATO” are really just numerical ways of saying the United States is getting screwed by supposed friends who are laughing all the way to the bank. [...]
IThese ideas of Trump’s, moreover, are not new; they appear to be among the president’s core convictions. In 1987, he took out a full-page ad in several newspapers calling on the U.S. government to “tax” allies such as Japan and Saudi Arabia so that the American economy could “grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defense of their freedom” and whose “stake in their protection is far greater than ours.” In a 1990 Playboy interview, he argued that “our country needs more ego” because “our so-called allies” have “outegotized this country” and made “billions screwing us” by controlling “the greatest money machine ever assembled and it’s sitting on our backs.” A President Trump, he said, “wouldn’t trust anyone. He wouldn’t trust the Russians; he wouldn’t trust our allies.” (Ahead of this week’s NATO summit, Trump deployed strikingly similar language, accusing America’s allies of being “worse” than its adversaries by “robbing” the U.S. “piggy bank.” He also lamented that the United States disproportionately supports NATO even though it “helps [the Europeans] a lot more than it helps us.”)
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