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:
Read the entire article
