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National security specialist Tom Nichols of The Atlantic expressed starkly just what this means: “The leader of one of America’s two major political parties has just signaled to the Kremlin that if elected, he would not only refuse to defend Europe, but he would gladly support Vladimir Putin during World War III and even encourage him to do as he pleases to America’s allies.” Former NATO supreme commander Wesley Clark called Trump’s comments “treasonous.”
To be clear, Trump’s beef with NATO has nothing to do with money. Trump has always misrepresented NATO as a sort of protection racket, but as Nick Paton Walsh of CNN put it today: “NATO is not an alliance based on dues: it is the largest military bloc in history, formed to face down the Soviet threat, based on the collective defense that an attack on one is an attack on all—a principle enshrined in Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty.”
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