Trump: No Foreign Aid w/o Guarantees from NATO Countries Refusing To Pay Fair Share
BY TYLER DURDEN
While the Biden administration reels from its own Justice Department concluding that the president is too senile to be prosecuted for mishandling classified documents, the left is lashing out over recent comments made by former President Donald Trump about NATO and US foreign aid.
“NATO was busted until I came along. I said, everybody’s going to pay,” said Trump during a Saturday campaign rally in South Carolina. “They said, ‘Well, if we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They couldn’t believe the answer.”
“One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay, and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’ I said, ‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Let’s say that happened. No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.’ You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”
Trump said that due to his pressure to convince NATO members to pay their agreed upon share in the alliance, “hundreds of billions of dollars” came into the organization, “and that’s why they have money today, because of what I did,” Trump continued.
During his 2016 campaign, President Trump had warned that under his leadership, the United States would be able to abandon its NATO commitments to nations that don’t commit two percent of their GDP to military spending as mentioned in the alliance’s guidelines.
According to a 2023 NATO report, only seven of the 31 allies met the 2 percent GDP spending target on defense in 2022. Even this was an improvement over 2014, when only three allies fulfilled the minimum requirement. –Epoch Times
Distract!
White House spox Andrew Bates called Trump’s comments “unhinged,” telling Reuters: “Encouraging invasions of our closest allies by murderous regimes is appalling and unhinged – and it endangers American national security, global stability and our economy at home.”
EU Commissioner Thierry Breton told France’s LCI television that Trump’s comments were “nothing new under the sun,” adding “He maybe has issues with his memory, it was actually a female president, not of a country, but of the European Union,” referring to European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen and a conversation she had with Trump in 2020.
(Not exactly calling the President of Egypt the President of Mexico while trying to think of the President of Israel ‘issues with his memory,’ eh Theirry?)
“Stupid no longer”
Over the weekend Trump also called on US Congress to stop gifting US aid to foreign nation without “strings” attached.
“From this point forward, are you listening U.S. Senate(?), no money in the form of foreign aid should be given to any country unless it is done as a loan, not just a giveaway,” he wrote in a Saturday post on Truth Social.
“It can be loaned on extraordinarily good terms, like no interest and an unlimited life, but a loan nevertheless.
“The deal should be (Contingent!) that the U.S. is helping you as a nation, but if the country we are helping ever turns against us, or strikes it rich sometime in the future, the loan will be paid off and the money returned to the United States.”
As the Epoch Times notes further;
The suggestion comes as the GOP front-runner and leader of the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement campaigns for the 2024 presidency with a foreign policy record that caused somewhat of a stir on the international stage.
As the 45th president of the United States, President Trump pushed many contrarian views on the world stage, questioning why the United States has been expected to fund more than its fair share in multilateral efforts.
He said at the time that he believed many of the international platforms were no longer serving the U.S. interests he wanted to prioritize, such as providing benefit to U.S. producers and manufacturing over those of other countries.
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(TLB) published this article by Tyler Durden as posted at ZeroHedge
Header featured image (edited) credit: Trump/David Swanson/Reuters
Emphasis added by (TLB)
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