Quote:
Originally Posted by alazo1985
Keed,
NATO’s lack of meeting goals is t what’s driving our defense spending so high. Our defense spending is bloated because we gotta keep ordering tanks to make sure the tank factory economy in town X doesn’t disappear so that representative doesn’t get voted out, and national defense, etc etc. We buy way more than we need to and are incredibly wasteful because of systemic inefficiency and waste, regardless of how much NATO spends. The real issue is Trump is trying to come up with reasons to undermine NATO and weaken it, not to actually convince them to spend more.
Of course Germany's low defense spending has nothing to do with USA#1's high defense spending. And I'm all for cutting US defense spending and spending that money on something useful or not spending that money at all.
I'm simply saying that the narrative of "Trump is trying to get NATO countries to spend more on defense because PUTIN" is insane, as it ignores two important things. 1) Putin doesn't want higher defense spending by NATO members. 2) Trump is simply continuing the position of Obama, W, Clinton, etc of calling for Euro NATO members to meet the 2% metric. It's an issue with bipartisan agreement and has been for decades.
Lets say that Trump came out saying, hey, you know what, it's fine you aren't making that 2% number. Big deal, that's fine, everyone's friends here. Hey, go down to 0.5% if you want. You can be sure that MSNBC would be all over that saying that Trump was going against decades of established US policy to benefit Putin.