Preparing summit with Russian President on July 16 in Helsinki of Finland, Trump considers NATO Allies are bad but Vladimir Putin is good
Sunday, July 08, 2018
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| Trump meets Putin at G7 Summit 2018 (Getty Image) |
VietPress USA (July 8, 2018): The aljazeera.com said that "On July 16, US President Donald Trump will meet in the Finnish capital Helsinki a triumphant Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has just secured another victory in the Syrian war and obtained the international recognition he wanted from hosting the World Cup.
The Russian president will seek to exploit the growing rift between the United States and the European Union and the intensifying Iranian-Israeli rivalry to achieve his two main goals: Break Russia out of international isolation and become the sole kingmaker in Syria.
But in pursuing a deal with Trump, Putin poses the biggest threat to the legitimacy of his US counterpart domestically and internationally. The US establishment and intelligence community largely believe that the Kremlin favoured him in the 2016 US presidential race and an investigation into alleged Russian interference is still ongoing.
At the same time, Trump is confronted with an increasingly disgruntled group of allies who are wary of Russia's aggressive posturing. That he will be meeting Putin right after attending the NATO summit in Brussels and visiting the UK (which has just had a major diplomatic crisis with Moscow), will not please any of them"
A report from the HuffPost today said that Trump considers NATO allies are bad and Vladimir Putin of Russia is good.
Read this news from HuffPost on Yahoo News at:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/world-according-trump-nato-allies-110146054.html
VietPress USA News
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In The World According To Trump, NATO Allies Are Bad And Putin Is Good
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The world’s most influential authoritarian in Helsinki the following Monday.
Normally an American president would enjoy warm relations at the first meeting and get a frostier reception at the second. But as the United States, its traditional allies and the rest of the world have learned over the past 18 months, Donald Trump is not a normal president ― which is raising concerns that he will alienate NATO members and then cozy up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
“Our allies support the United States. Our adversaries are trying to undercut us. I don’t know how to turn that around for him,” said Heather Conley, who served in the State Department under President George W. Bush and now runs the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “That’s why we’re so nervous about the summit.”
Trump has already offered hints about his likely approach. Last month, after refusing to sign onto a joint statement from other leaders of industrialized economies at the G-7 summit, Trump fired off letters to a number of NATO nations complaining that they were not spending enough on their militaries.
It is a theme Trump has hammered on for years: that the rest of the world takes advantage of the United States through alliances and trade agreements skewed in their favor. Many times, Trump has falsely claimed that other NATO members are not paying “what they owe” to NATO and that their dereliction puts an unfair burden on U.S. taxpayers ― which is a fundamental misrepresentation of how the treaty organization works.
“We’re the schmucks who pay for the whole thing,” Trump told supporters at a Montana rally Thursday. “We’re the piggy bank that everybody likes to rob. Allies. Friends. We protect them. NATO. Unfair,” he said to a gathering of Nevada Republicans in June.
In fact, while there are relatively modest dues that nations pay for NATO’s administration, the bulk of the costs lies in the members’ spending on their own militaries, which train together to prepare for joint operations.
Trump in his first meeting with NATO leaders last year famously failed to pledge his support for the alliance’s mutual defense clause. This came at the unveiling of a new NATO headquarters memorial to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the United States ― the only time that Article 5 of the alliance’s charter has ever been invoked. And that decision wound up putting thousands of NATO troops in Afghanistan for going on two decades.
The president’s public posturing is actually making it harder for these leaders to do what he wants them to do. Heather Conley, a former State Department official
In 2014, following the establishment of the Islamic State’s “caliphate” on the border of member nation Turkey and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, NATO’s membership agreed that each country would spend at least 2 percent of its economy on defense within a 10-year time frame.
“No one pledged to get to 2 percent in a year or overnight,” said Doug Lute, the former U.S. ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama. “They are, I would argue, making progress. All allies, across the board, have made real increases in defense spending ― $87 billion over four years is real money.”
Conley emphasized that these increases began years ago. “They made that commitment well before President Trump even announced his candidacy,” she said.
Further, leaders of those countries now face challenges in funneling more money to defense while coming under domestic pressure to stand up to Trump, Conley said. “The president’s public posturing is actually making it harder for these leaders to do what he wants them to do,” she noted.
Officials in Trump’s administration, meanwhile, have tried to downplay his attacks on NATO and overtures to Putin ― in the process sounding more like presidents of past decades than the man they work for in their embrace of Western Europe and skepticism about Russia.
In a conference call with reporters on Thursday, Trump’s ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman, laid out a litany of Russia’s transgressions in recent years. “Whether that is election meddling, malign activities throughout Europe, including the Balkans, the U.K. and Brexit, France and Italy, just to mention a few,” Huntsman said.
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