Making Russia strong again
Trump's war is doing Putin's bidding on multiple fronts.
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The Putin regime may be sharing intelligence that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is using to target US troops, but President Trump is more mad at NATO. Sure, Trump’s adoration for Putin stopped being surprising a long time ago, but it’s notable that he’ll make excuses for the Russian strongman even if he has American blood on his hands.
Alas, in recent comments to the press, America’s aspiring strongman has been railing against our erstwhile allies for not being more eager to put lives and treasure on the line in the Strait of Hormuz to help him salvage a war he started without consulting them.
“I said, 'For 40 years we're protecting you and you don't want to get involved in something very minor?' Very few shots are gonna be taken because they don't have many shots left. But they said, ‘We’d rather not get involved,’” Trump said yesterday, recalling (or making up) recent conversations he had with other foreign leaders.
He continued, “I’ve been a big critic of all of the protecting of countries because I know we’ll protect them, but if we ever needed help, they wouldn’t be there for us. I’ve just known that for a long period of time.”
Trump has taken aim at NATO during numerous recent press events, including a Sunday evening gaggle on Air Force One.
"We're always there for NATO. We're helping them with Ukraine. It's got an ocean in between us,” he said. “It doesn't affect us, but we've helped them. It would be interesting to see what country wouldn't help us with a very small endeavor, which is just keeping the strait open.”
How dare the rest of NATO not join Trump’s illegal, unnecessary war in Iran! How dare our allies not send warships to the Strait of Hormuz to risk getting blown up by Iranian mines! Don’t they know it is their job to clean up after Trump? Surely that’s somewhere in the NATO treaty, right?
Here’s Trump’s logic as to why other countries are required to scurry to the strait: “I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory because it is their territory. It’s the place from which they get their energy.” According to Trump, this means that China, France, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom, along with some unspecified “others,” have to help.
That is an exceedingly odd definition of “territory.” The Strait of Hormuz is in international waters and does not belong to any country at all. Iran can control shipping not because it has any claim to the strait, but because it borders the waterway, making it easy to attack ships and lay mines. Functionally, Trump is saying that countries that get Gulf oil via ships transiting the strait magically transform that international waterway into their own territory, which they are then obliged to help protect.
This is, of course, ridiculous, and not just because Trump has invented an entirely new definition of territory, one that lives only in his head. It’s also ridiculous because, even if we pretend this definition is valid, there is nothing in the NATO treaty allowing one member to dictate how other members decide to protect their own interests.
There’s another wee problem here, which is that China, Japan, and South Korea are not members of NATO. So, Trump’s threat that “I think it will be very bad for the future of NATO” if countries don’t agree to assist him isn’t really going to rattle those three nations at all.
Trump kicked off his illegal war by ignoring the advice of his own chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, who told Trump that if he attacked Iran, it would likely react by closing the strait. Preventing precisely this situation “has been a bedrock principle of US national security policy for decades,” as a former US official said to the Wall Street Journal. Trump didn’t listen, and he didn’t care. But now that his unilateral actions have spawned global instability, other countries are supposed to make things all better.
In Trump’s mind, the United States is the poor, beleaguered country that has to do everything for all the other deadbeat ones: “Why are we maintaining the Hormuz Strait when it’s really there for China and many other countries? Why aren’t they doing it?”
It appears Trump has as curious a definition for “maintaining” as he does for “territory.” Traffic through the strait was perfectly fine until he started bombing Iran, a move that basically guaranteed Iran would respond by blocking access. We haven’t done anything to keep the strait open or make it safer for commercial ships. We’re not doing anything that protects the interests of other countries. We’re not maintaining a thing.
A mockery of Article 5
It’s hard to guess at how Trump arrived at the notion that NATO members are required to help out here. It’s likely a mangled reading of Article 5 of the treaty, which covers collective defense.
An armed attack against any NATO country creates an obligation for all other NATO members to assist. But, of course, the US wasn’t attacked by Iran. Trump did the attacking here. Collective defense is just that — defense, and is in no way a requirement that other NATO countries have to join a war of aggression.
It’s worth remembering that Trump had a lot to say about Article 5 during his first campaign, where he refused to say that the United States would automatically assist if another NATO member were attacked. Instead, Trump said that if Russia attacked a NATO member, he would only assist countries that have “fulfilled their obligations to us.”
Of course, other NATO countries aren’t obliged to the US any more than any other signatory to the treaty. But Trump became fixated on the fact that several NATO members were not spending at least two percent of their GDP on defense, which was the target in 2016. Their inability or failure to do so, in Trump’s mind, meant that they were failing the United States specifically. It also served as the justification for his absolutely unprecedented assertion that he could singlehandedly ignore Article 5.
Trump convinced himself that other NATO members have routinely taken advantage of the United States while the United States has asked nothing of NATO. Indeed, that’s part of his justification, such as it is, for demanding that Denmark give up Greenland voluntarily or that he would take it by force: “We want a piece of ice for world protection, and they won’t give it. We’ve never asked for anything else. They have a choice. You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative. Or you can say no, and we will remember.”
Yeah, about that whole “we’ve never asked for anything else” — you get one guess as to what country has been the beneficiary of Article 5’s collective defense requirement. Yep, it’s the United States.
Article 5 has only been invoked once, immediately after the 9/11 attacks. But according to Trump, he still wasn’t sure if NATO would meet the “ultimate test” of defending us if we were attacked, a conclusion he got to by disregarding all the efforts of the NATO coalition, saying, “We’ve never needed them … they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan … and they did, they stayed a little back, a little off the frontlines.”
That would be news to several NATO countries, especially Britain, which lost about 450 soldiers in Afghanistan. Of the approximately 3,500 NATO soldiers killed in Afghanistan, about a third of those were from countries other than the United States. Overall, other countries supplied roughly 20 percent of the troops in Afghanistan. In the Iraq war, 320 of the 4,813 fatalities were from non-US forces.
Ignoring all of that, Trump instead mused on Truth Social that maybe the US “should have put NATO to the test: Invoked Article 5, and forced NATO to come here and protect our Southern Border from further Invasions of Illegal Immigrants, thus freeing up large numbers of Border Patrol Agents for other tasks.”
Given that there is no way that constitutes an invasion, it doesn’t really seem all that likely that NATO would have jumped on board just so Trump could send border patrol agents to do something else.
That said, European countries have been thinking about Article 5 quite a bit lately, just not in the way Trump would like. His threat to seize Greenland by force if Denmark refuses to hand it over to him creates a huge Article 5 conundrum.
NATO didn’t anticipate a pariah United States
Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark, one of NATO’s founding members. Were Trump to make good on his threats, that would trigger Article 5, and all NATO members would be obligated to provide assistance to Greenland and Denmark.
But nothing in the NATO treaty contemplated one NATO member attacking another, and Article 5 requires the unanimous consent of all NATO members. Obviously, the United States wouldn’t consent to such a thing if we invaded Greenland, and that lack of unanimity would entirely block the rest of NATO from providing assistance.
It’s tempting to fault the NATO alliance for not having proactively addressed this possibility when drafting the treaty. However, no one could possibly have anticipated that the most powerful NATO member would threaten to invade an ally for no real reason except Trump’s rancid vibes.
There was also no way that NATO members could have anticipated that the United States would bomb another country, unprovoked, and then invent a truly deranged rationale that Iran has actually been attacking us for 47 years.
That said, Trump isn’t even bothering to hang his NATO demand on the idea that Iran was somehow the actual aggressor here. Instead, NATO should help because “we’re always there for NATO. We’re helping them with Ukraine. It’s got an ocean in between us. Doesn’t affect us, but we’ve helped them.”
It’s not clear if Trump fully understands that Ukraine is not part of NATO. It’s also not clear if Trump thinks that assisting Ukraine specifically protects NATO members generally. For Trump to think that, he would have to acknowledge that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is part of Putin’s longtime goal of breaking the NATO alliance. Finally, it’s not clear how Trump thinks he’s been staunchly protecting Ukraine while aligning himself with Putin’s demands that Ukraine cede territory and lifting sanctions on Russian oil sales.
Trump also seems to have forgotten that the White House has been aggressively pushing NATO to end existing missions in Iraq and Kosovo because NATO’s defense pact should only apply to the Euro-Atlantic area. It’s tough to square the belief that NATO is overreaching by maintaining a small advisory mission in Iraq with the belief that NATO is required to come help Trump with the mess he’s made right next door in Iran.
And finally, in demanding that NATO (along with Japan, South Korea, and China) provide warships to escort commercial ships through the strait, Trump is calling on those countries to take a risk that the United States won’t take. Our navy keeps refusing any requests to escort ships, with one Navy official describing the strait as an “Iranian ‘kill box.’” According to US defense officials, escorting is a no-go as long as Iran can still attack ships. But somehow NATO members and assorted other countries should put their ships and people in danger instead of us?
Trump didn’t bother to check with NATO or anyone else before attacking Iran. He’s spent the last 16 months alienating other countries and retreating from the world stage. He’s made clear he does not value cooperation with other countries and recognizes no obligations to them. The big tough guy kicked this war off alone, so he should be able to finish it the same way.
That’s it for today
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This regime isn’t just incompetent, it’s operationally moronic at every level.
Trump started an unauthorized war without consulting allies, ignored his own Joint Chiefs warning Iran would close Hormuz, then acts shocked when Iran closed Hormuz. Now he’s demanding NATO clean up his mess while Russia feeds Iran targeting intel that’s killing American troops…oh, and Trump won’t criticize Putin.
The sheer F ing stupidity: Calling Hormuz “their territory” because countries get oil through it.
Demanding China help when China isn’t in NATO. Threatening NATO members if they don’t join his illegal war while simultaneously threatening to invade Denmark (a NATO member) over Greenland.
Navy calls the Strait an Iranian “kill box,” refuses escort duty, but Trump demands other countries send their ships into the meat grinder he created.
Who’s the biggest fool now?!
Meanwhile: Russia gets $140M/day from lifted sanctions, oil $100/barrel benefiting Putin, Patriots depleted that Ukraine needs, European allies fracturing. Every outcome benefits Russia. Trump still won’t say Putin’s name.
This isn’t 4D chess. These are the dumbest people ever handed authority—-malignant narcissist sexual abuser executing oligarchical extraction while wearing governance as costume, surrounded by sycophants too incompetent to see they’re Putin’s useful idiots.
The whole regime looks exactly as stupid as it is.
—Johan
P.S. If you are still working for this regime, recognize you are the problem, you are a cancer.
Your article is quite welcome, since the bloated, fascist trump is committing treason and it gets little no attention from crappy corporate media, and the dimwitted White House press corps. Why arena trump, whitcoff and kushner being held accountable for helping Russia, who is helping Iran target US personnel, US bases, and US allies. Isn't that the definition of treason? Corporate media ignores this coddling of enemies as US military members die putin must have loads of kompromat on the criminal in thief trump… U.S. Constitution (Article III, Section 3), consists only of levying war against the United States or adhering to their enemies by giving them aid and comfort.
trump and company make Russia's kleptocracy wealthy and put greater strains on Americans. The most incompetent people are trying to manage the most complex of issues. This is not a proud moment for America and a steep price will be paid for electing the pedophile friend in thief to a seocnd term because the price of eggs were too high and pronoun paranoia...