Donald Trump has dedicated half his life to sabotaging the greatest achievement in terms of security and defense of the two sides of the Atlantic: NATO.
It began in September 1987, when, seemingly out of the blue, the mogul Trump, whose interests had until then been limited to real estate and the casino business, paid for a page of advertising in major American newspapers, accusing the European allies in NATO of ripping off America.
This kind of attack, aimed to shake public support for NATO, was, “coincidentally”, part of the USSR agenda, carefully cultivated through the KGB. Moscow’s subversive agenda also included the denigration of American institutions, with the aim of weakening, from within, the competing superpower. Here, too, Donald Trump’s fingerprints are everywhere, since his youth, but especially since he was elected and re-elected president in his old age.
To satisfy both objectives, the KGB implemented in the Soviet era and maintained to this day what has become known as “active measures” – a systematic, long-winded, and flawlessly complex game of influence. It was a mechanism in which Donald Trump was probably the most effective of the wheels.
Two elements should be noted:
- The moment in September 1987, when Trump filled the American public space with Soviet anti-NATO and generally anti-Western propaganda, paid for out of his own pocket, was only two months before his first visit to Moscow – a place not open to anyone and where you weren’t just welcomed.
- Once installed in the White House, Donald Trump could trash these institutions – something he has done more pronouncedly in his second term.
The fact that Donald Trump links his own “disgust” of NATO to Iran (a term he himself used in an interview with Reuters just a few hours before his speech to the nation), is just a cunning cover for a decades-old complicity with Moscow’s agenda towards NATO and the West.
At the same time, the fact that Trump is now making this connection, between flirting with leaving NATO and NATO’s refusal to get involved in war in Iran, is also a perverse maneuver to mask his failure in this conflict.
Because the modus operandi of the businessman and then of President Trump is no longer a well-kept secret: whenever he faces failure, Donald Trump makes two moves:
- He blames others, even if they aren’t to blame, and had nothing to do with his own catastrophic decisions. He did so as a businessman, especially when he was in the casino business and is doing the same now, as president, whether it’s tariffs or the White House’s bitter stalemate in its war against Iran.
- Trump is creating a competing narrative to distract attention from the failure that is grinding him down in real time. He did so with Iran, starting a war when the Epstein affair, immigration and tariffs were declared illegal by the Supreme Court. He is doing so with NATO and (soon) Cuba, once Iran has become an obvious risk for the Trump administration and the Republican Party (before congressional elections). Of course, Iran has also become a systemic risk to the global economy and the international security environment.
The fact that Donald Trump expresses his personal disgust with NATO and even the scenario of an eventual US withdrawal doesn’t mean the Iran nightmare will automatically disappear.
It will not disappear, because Iran has the bad habit of harassing its aggressors even on their own territory. Tehran did it eight years in a row with Iraq, in the 80s, without taking into account the inhumane exorbitant price paid by its own population and economy.
These are all the prerequisites for Tehran to find Washington an even more tempting prey than Baghdad (and Moscow and Beijing have every interest in cultivating this feeling).
The fact that Trump jumps to the West’s jugular, following the Soviet-Russian manual of “active operations” to the letter, threatening to shatter NATO, again, doesn’t guarantee him success.
NATO member countries are indeed free to leave. But such a step, at least in the case of the US, involves more than the will of a single individual, even if he is the head of state, with the air of an absolute king and monarch.
Trump may express his disgust, he may even announce that America will leave the alliance, but the next steps inevitably involve Congress, the will of the people (in America, the majority of the population is favorable to NATO), as well as possible self-preservation reflexes from the more responsible areas of the deep state.
It is easy to say, but less easy to do.
But easy to say and difficult to do is not impossible, so both internal and external factors who don’t want the US to leave NATO need to be extremely vigilant.
I have listed the internal factors. External factors are represented by the other Member States.
Member states have every interest in the US remaining in NATO and the alliance remaining intact, despite the lack of credibility America has created by the Trump presidency.
However, member states cannot directly prevent a possible US exit from NATO although they can try indirectly to prevent it.
How allies would intervene remains open to debate, best known by those within the alliance who are familiar with the sphere of analysis and decision-making.
But in principle, things should be clear, whether you’re modest observer or you are part of the rarefied backstage of the North Atlantic organization.
The principle is this: America, not just Donald Trump, must be made to understand how high and unsustainable the price of America’s exit from NATO can be.
The price has several dimensions.
- Financial – costs for one’s own security internally and externally will not decrease significantly, but, on the contrary, will increase significantly, due to the decrease in the return on investments in security. One is the yield derived from the context of an alliance and therefore the division of labor and tasks. Another is the cost of doing everything yourself.
- Politics – an America isolated from NATO will inevitably be an America less relevant on the world stage; and an America that is less relevant on the world stage will gradually become a poorer and less technologically performing America. Even Maoist China felt, at one point, the need to open up to the world, otherwise the opening China to the Nixonian, in the Mao era, would not have been possible, however much Nixon and Kissinger wanted it. Subsequently, under Deng Xiaoping and his successors, including Xi Jinping, Beijing understood openness to the world better, in terms of the link between openness, development and economic growth. In the Xi era, this type of approach has gained unstoppable momentum. In fact, today, Xi’s China occupies every millimeter of political, economic and geographical space left by Trump’s America.
- Geographical and security – without NATO’s physical presence and without access to the infrastructure and territory of NATO states, America would be lose power: devoid of hands, feet, hearing, sight and sense of smell. The war in Iran demonstrated this, after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had previously illustrated nothing else. The advanced presence beyond its own territory gives America unparalleled comfort in passive security and, when the situation requires it, a platform like no one else has in terms of projecting force at any point, no matter how far away. A US exit from NATO will automatically mean the loss of these strategic advantages. You can have all the dollars in the world, but you won’t be able to use them at the market.
Europeans, especially are the most prepared (and, of course, the most motivated) to make America understand how much it has to lose if Trump’s Russian vision of the world is successful.
On the one hand, Europeans have the most to offer America. And on the other, Europeans have gained real experience on this level of hazardous exits, such as Brexit less than a decade ago.
That was a move that, also by chance, Trump applauded. The UK’s exit from the European Union taught EU members how to make the cost sufficiently high so that no other state would propose such a thing.
It later taught the British that it was worse outside the EU than inside it, both economically and from a security perspective (again, the war in Iran proved that community is more effective than loneliness – in the early days, but also later, British interests outside the UK were more quickly defended by the intervention of partners on the continent than by the intervention of London).
Donald Trump is a sinister guy who is under Russian influence and incapable of thinking ahead.
Europeans, Canadians, Australians, some Asians and even Americans themselves today have every interest in destabilizing and then anesthetizing him. Although not a simple, they have enough cards to achieve this.
- PS: In the Iranian file, Trump has only bad and extremely bad options.
- He can withdraw (this is the bad option vertically, but somewhat life-saving horizontally).
- These following are the extremely bad options:
- He can withdraw but leave the Europeans and the Gulf states to clear up the mess – for example, unblocking the Strait of Hormuz (an extremely bad scenario for the whole world, inevitably for America as well). In such a scenario, Iran will even be made “greater”, because the essence of the regime remains intact, and Tehran privatizes the Strait of Hormuz, taxing traffic with millions of dollars per ship – which will give it access to huge liquidity, good for its rapid reconstruction.
- Or he can also send troops on the ground, prolonging the war, prolonging the global economic and energy crisis, at the same time exhausting America both economically (the price of fuel at the pump has also exploded in the US), and militarily, and politically.
