Trump had a group over to breakfast at the U.S. Embassy in Belgium and “got right to work” so to speak, in attacking German policy. In true Trump fashion, he started out wrong on the facts: Trump accused Germany of being a “captive” of Russia.
Rawstory is bringing us the basics.
In a startling public outburst against the NATO heavweight, Trump told NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg that Germany was wrong to support a new $11-billion Baltic Sea pipeline to import Russian gas while being slow to meet targets for contributing to NATO defense spending that was intended to protect Europe from Russia.
That’s our “boy” – quite literally – telling other countries what their domestic policy ought to be, disingenuous in premising his attack on the one thing that Russia likely most approves of (so we know Trump doesn’t actually oppose Germany’s decision), and totally butchering NATO’s mission.
Newsflash to everyone here (you already know this); We “assist” NATO nations because it exponentially helps our OWN defense to have Russia boxed-in “over there” rather than having no “buffer” between Russia and us. I once read a military specialist who said that one cannot understand Russia unless one understands that they are fixated upon their “mostly landlocked nature” and are deeply paranoid – thus their biggest priority is finding real “blue water” ports to the real ocean, and guess who has those? ALL of Europe.
Then Trump pulls classic Trump move, and is 100% wrong on his facts:
Trump, who is set to hold a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel later on Wednesday, appeared to substantially overstate German reliance on Russian energy and to imply the German government was funding the pipeline, which Berlin says is a commercial venture.
Great. So Trump criticized the German government about a completely private corporate endeavor. And where the fk does he get off lecturing other countries about their entanglements with Russia? We had Russia ATTACK our country, we saw Russia ATTACK Brexit, and Trump is the last human being on Earth to still deny that Russia actually did it. Yet there he sits, lecturing Germany.
This is going to be epic-bad, real bad. Does he realize how many presidents, over decades, went step by meticulous step, in building the relationships and partnerships we have with NATO? Does he realize that the fact that we pay for much of it allowed us to have a far greater “say” in how we deployed NATO defense? No.
Great start, jackass. Sir. Sr, Jackass.
