(Dobbs) Our Allies Are Scared Stiff
What happens when allies cannot rely on our word, let alone our army?
Up is down and down is up.
If the autocratic ex-president who aspires to be president again somehow overcomes his indecent, immoral, illegal, and unpatriotic behavior and wins his way back to the White House, that’s how the world will look. Up will be down and down will be up.
America will no longer be the protector of the free world. America will abandon its democratic allies and cozy up to dictators. America will adopt an ugly definition of friend and foe and throw its once priceless principles supporting freedom and democracy overboard.
We don’t really need proof— we had four years of proof when Donald Trump was in the White House— but what we learned at a campaign rally in South Carolina a few days ago was that he hasn’t changed his tune. What other conclusion can we reach after reading the boastful story he told his faithful followers about a NATO summit he attended while he was president? You’ll recall, one of Trump’s pet peeves was that our European allies in NATO were not paying their fair share.
“One of the presidents of a big country stood up,” he recounted, “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 [presumably the Russians] to do whatever the hell they want.’”
Up is down and down is up.
It’s hard to even imagine a past and wannabe future president saying he would encourage the Russians— the butchers who are destroying Ukraine, whose leaders have destroyed dissent— to do “whatever the hell they want.” But we are far past the point where anything with this guy is hard to imagine.
Trump might get his adoring acolytes to cheer him on for his tough talk (which they did), but our allies— the nations with which we have military and commercial and diplomatic alliances that are as much in our interest as in theirs— aren’t the least bit cheered. They are scared stiff. A few leaders from across Europe have already said as much.
But it was hammered home in a more personal way by a man from Taiwan who I just met this week during a trip to Vietnam. He had read Donald Trump’s remarks, and fears that just as Trump would throw NATO overboard in deference to debt, and just as Trump would throw Ukraine overboard in deference to Putin, he would throw democratic Taiwan overboard in deference to a more powerful China.
This is not paranoia. Right now the Taiwan Relations Act says that the U.S. will use its resources “to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan.” This man knows full well that if the United States— what he called “our big brother”— withdraws from that commitment in the event that China invades the isolated island, his free and independent nation will literally disappear. “If Trump is elected,” he sadly told me, “Taiwan is destroyed. We are destroyed.”
But it’s worse than that. His practical projection is that if the U.S. tells Taiwan that it’s on its own, his nation will not wait to be attacked because it cannot wait to be attacked. It will have no choice but to proactively surrender to China’s demand that it become a subservient state, on a par with Hong Kong, which long ago lost its right to self-determination. Self-determination is not part of the vocabulary in the People’s Republic of China.
And even that might not be the end of it. If under Donald Trump Taiwan no longer can depend on the United States of America, can Vietnam, the Philippines, South Korea, even Japan, rely on our word, let alone our army?
According to his former National Security Advisor John Bolton, the answer is no. He wrote yesterday on CNN.com that retired General John Kelly, one of Trump’s White House chiefs of staff, told him, “Trump’s disparagement of US security commitments extends to its mutual defense agreements with South Korea and Japan as well.”
And NATO? He characterizes Trump’s myopic view of this longstanding alliance as, “If we didn’t have NATO, then Putin wouldn’t be doing these things.” Of course the reality is, NATO keeps Putin from doing even more.
When we vote in November, it’s not just about a Republican candidate who purloined national security documents and encouraged insurrection. It’s about a world, as messy as it already is, getting even messier. It’s about a world where the United States forsakes its commitments and hands power to dictatorships to do as they please with weaker nations within their spheres of influence. Donald Trump is fond of telling crowds that if he had been president the past few years, none of the wars now being fought would have happened. That’s hogwash. When he declared at a summit with Vladimir Putin that he trusted Putin’s word over the word of his own chiefs of intelligence, he set the stage for Ukraine. When he encouraged Israel to tighten its rein on the Palestinians whose territories it controls, he set the stage for Hamas.
It might be true that in a second Trump presidency there would be no more wars, but that’s only because no matter how aggressive our adversaries would become, the United States would not bother to respond.
Heaven help us.
Yep, Trump’s rhetoric is beyond scary! Truly frightening.
Bravo! Excellent piece Greg. If only the major media would have the courage to cover this as you are.