Is Putin using Trump to kill Nato?

8 comments

1. As Trump remains not just non-committal to Nato but outright hostile, the alliance’s basis of collective defence is under threat. It appears that Russia plans to needle Nato members in the coming years to erode the collective defence principle and render the alliance meaningless.

   To be sure, analysts do not expect Vladimir Putin to make a move now when Russia is completely engaged in the war in Ukraine. However, once the war ends in Ukraine or goes into a low-intensity mode, Russia is bound to turn its attention to its other neighbours.

   Trump has made it clear that he is not interested in a peace deal that ends the war respectably for Ukraine or deters Russia from further military invasions of Europe. In fact, in a call with Putin on Monday, he endorsed the Russian position on the war and, in a blow to Ukraine and its European partners, gave up his own call for a 30-day ceasefire.

   There are indications that European nations would hesitate to take military action against Russia without US support — even though the United Kingdom has been working on a ‘coalition of the willing’ to militarily support Ukraine, it has said it would not deploy soldiers to Ukraine without US support. Such US support would not be expected under Trump — or a successor who shares Trump’s worldview.

   This would mean that Putin would need to mount incursions into smaller Nato members that share borders with Russia. If these nations fail to respond on their own or fellow Nato nations fail to mobilise militarily to their defence under the collective defence principle, Nato would be essentially dead as there would be essentially no Nato without the collective defence principle, according to Jamie Metzl, a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council who previously served in the White House National Security Council.

   “If Putin gets anything resembling a victory in Ukraine, what he is going to do next is to needle a Nato member, such as Lithuania, and even if Russia goes just 50 feet inside Lithuania, the country is understandably going to invoke Article 5. If Nato fails to mobilise in Lithuania’s support, then the collective defence principle of Nato would be dead and Putin would have defeated Nato with just a minor incursion with perhaps a small contingent of ‘little green men’ that he used in Crimea,” Metzl previously told Firstpost.

2. He probably is. Putin knows that he can take on the EU easily without American involvement. And Trump really doesnt like the EU

3. NATO was killed in 2008 by Merkel and Sarkozy.

   It was at that point when Russia was allowed to decide who can and who can not be a member of an alliance that was created to contain Russia.

   Trump simply started doing what Merkel and Sarkozy was doing back then.

   Merkel and Sarkozy treated American membership as granted and started trading security of other countries because they were sure that their own security was guaranteed. This removed any incentive to care about anything that was happening in Ukraine and Georgia.

   As long as the US remain a NATO member – Western Europe has no reason to care about what is happening in Eastern Europe.

4. I wanna know HOW he’s using him and WHY trump is doing it.

5. The idea that Trump is actually Putin’s puppet or some sort of Russian agent is silly. I understand the narrative as a matter of rhetoric, but I’ve seen way too many people treat it unironically these days

6. You guys might not like my take, but NATO will survive Trump and be as strong as it was during the cold war and maybe even stronger due to the rearmament of Europe because of the Trump unreliability and the accession of new members. Putin is no mastermind. He is just a wannabe czar that is turning himself into the hand-puppet of China, because the West wouldn’t let him sit at the big boys table

7. YA THINK!?!!?????!??

8. Yes.

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