The NATO Protection Racket: The Trump Administration Has a New Problem With Europe

[The Lawspeaker]

And that's Trump's real problem. NATO is not an alliance but a protection racket where Europeans are "supposed" to pay for American weapons and the "promise" of American protection while they are having their Turkish bed buddies open the borders and flood us with terrorists citing 1950s international laws they made us sign. In other words: America is like the Mafia - "pay us or we will burn down your shop !" Let's dump NATO and make our own weapons to protect ourselves and our fellow European neighbours.
Quote:

"It would be funny if it weren’t so damaging. The whole episode bolsters suspicions that the United States is interested more in enriching its own military-industrial complex than in improving the common defense. As a result, trans-Atlantic tensions, which Trump has done much to brew, will likely thicken. The case for higher European defense budgets will lose legitimacy if it comes to be seen as a mere appendage to Trump’s “America First” campaign."

The Trump Administration Has a New Problem With Europe

U.S. allies are finally spending more on defense. They’re just not giving the money to us.


By Fred Kaplan
June 10, 20193:53 PM



A German Tornado fighter aircraft prepares to land at Büchel Air Base on Feb. 27 near Cochem, Germany.
Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images

America’s European allies are finally spending more on defense, but the Trump administration is raising hell about it because some of the allies want to spend the money on weapons made in their own countries.

The irony is immense. Throughout his presidency, and even before, Trump has been browbeating the NATO allies to boost their defense budgets, even threatening to leave the alliance if they didn’t pony up. Now that they’re doing so in a politically viable way—by investing in their own companies—top U.S. officials are complaining.

It would be funny if it weren’t so damaging. The whole episode bolsters suspicions that the United States is interested more in enriching its own military-industrial complex than in improving the common defense. As a result, trans-Atlantic tensions, which Trump has done much to brew, will likely thicken. The case for higher European defense budgets will lose legitimacy if it comes to be seen as a mere appendage to Trump’s “America First” campaign.

The New York Times reported last week that Michael J. Murphy, a top official in the State Department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, “lectured” European Union ambassadors about their attempt to launch a new program that would exclude “third parties”—including the United States—from participating in cooperative military projects unless absolutely necessary.

Murphy was so angry about the issue, the Times reports, that he left no time in the session for discussion after his remarks. A “similar but less aggressive meeting” took place at the Pentagon, where discussion was allowed.

At his meeting with the ambassadors, Murphy accused the EU of “pursuing an industrial policy under the veneer of a security policy.” Two points should be made about this charge. First, it’s overstated. Even with the new policies, the NATO allies will still be buying lots of American weapons and supplies, including several—such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—that were designed as multinational projects.

Second, the charge is risible. Even within the United States, defense policy has always been, to a certain degree, industrial policy. Several years ago, when the U.S. Air Force was developing the F-22 stealth fighter plane, it deliberately spread the contracts and subcontracts to 46 states, giving a solid majority of senators—and a lot of House members—a financial and electoral stake in protecting the program. When Robert Gates, President Obama’s first defense secretary, killed the F-22, Congress allowed it only because the F-35s—which he not only preserved but expanded—had largely the same network of contractors.

The ploy is nothing new. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, the U.S. Army spread contracts for the Nike Zeus anti-ballistic missile system to 37 states, for the same reason. Ever since, the military services and their contractors have relied on their beneficiaries in Congress to make the arguments and deliver the votes to save their projects and budgets—sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. It’s part of the game, and for Murphy to harrumph about it bespeaks a degree of ignorance or arrogance fully deserving of the Europeans’ derision and scorn.

In their meetings, Murphy and the Pentagon officials did cite one genuinely substantive concern. It is known as “interoperability”—the fear that, in a war, allied operations might be hampered if U.S. and European forces were using different weapons, supplies, ammunition, and so forth. NATO commanders worried about this issue during the Cold War, when massive garrisons of forces from 16 allied nations trained to stave off an invasion of Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces along narrow sectors across the East-West German border. However, the concerns are somewhat overblown. In the years since the Cold War, NATO allies have conducted joint military operations in several theaters—Afghanistan, Kosovo, Libya, Iraq, the Mediterranean, and elsewhere. Some of these operations have been hampered by differences in tactics, strategy, or rules of engagement—but not by some incompatibility among the allies’ weapons systems. On the occasions when problems of that sort emerged, they were solved by on-the-spot workarounds.

Ivo Daalder, U.S. ambassador to NATO during the Obama administration and now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, told me in an email, “It’s true that, say, countries flying F-16s or F-35s can cooperate more closely—training together, pooling maintenance, sharing munitions, etc. But,” he went on, “non-U.S. planes (and ships, tanks, etc.) are perfectly interoperable with U.S. equipment and forces. And no one in Europe is arguing that there should be no interoperability with the U.S. We should welcome any effort by the Europeans to increase their defenses.”

Murphy told the EU ambassadors that their plan to build up their own defense industries, even just a little, would “create a new irritant in trans-Atlantic relations.” This is, at best, baffling. The European plan amounts to fairly normal industrial policy; certainly, it’s a step toward the sort of European unity that most presidents have welcomed and that even Trump has said he wants. As usual, Trump’s sharp protest is the only irritant.

[The Lawspeaker]

NATO SHMATO

Trump Wants to Turn America’s Alliances Into Protection Rackets

From Europe to the Korean Peninsula, Trump insists countries pay more for the U.S. troops. Meanwhile Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un enjoy the spectacle of shattering alliances.
Donald Kirk

Christopher Dickey

World News Editor

Updated 03.22.19 6:33AM ET / Published 01.15.19 2:13PM ET

UPDATE, March 9, 2019: Bloomberg reported Friday that the Trump administration "is drawing up demands that Germany, Japan and eventually any other country hosting U.S. troops pay the full price of American soldiers deployed on their soil—plus 50 percent or more for the privilege of hosting them." Many commentators were quick to denounce this as "protection money," and the words are well chosen, given that the president of the United States tends to think, talk, and act like a mobster.
The following article, published January 15 with the original headline "Trump Doesn’t Want Alliances Like NATO, He Wants U.S. Soldiers to Be Guns for Hire," cites evidence dating back to 2016 and explains why we should not be surprised by this latest move. Trump's treatment of longtime allies is destructive and dangerous. It is not new.
— Christopher Dickey


PARIS—Suspicions surrounding Donald Trump’s Russia connections have grown so intense that he’s now being asked directly, even on Fox News, whether he is working for Moscow. And every time he tries to slide by the issue, saying how insulted he is, the suspicions grow worse. At this point it’s an accusation hard for him to deny without giving it credence: “When did you stop beating your wife?” has become in effect, “When did you start taking orders from Russian President Vladimir Putin?”

Trump's insistence on meeting Putin one-on-one at Helsinki and other venues, along with Trump's reported talk about pulling out of NATO, all help to poison the atmosphere. A long Twitter thread by former FBI Special Agent Clint Watts is a particularly comprehensive list suggesting why Watts’ erstwhile colleagues were so suspicious of Trump in 2017 they opened a counterintelligence investigation of him as a potential Russian agent or source. “Special Counsel investigation must continue, this is a crisis, this is a national emergency,” Watts concludes.

But the situation is worse than that, and the damage much wider. Trump is aiding and abetting the nuclear-armed enemies of America — the same ones named in his administration’s own National Security Strategy — by doing everything he can to tear apart the alliances built to oppose and contain the blatant ambitions of Russia, China and North Korea.
Worse still, that’s Trump’s natural inclination.

What all of America's strategic enemies have learned to do is what any spy is taught in Spookery 101. The CIA's own job description for an operations officer (which is what Putin was for the Soviet KGB) tells applicants to “build relationships based on rapport and trust,” relying on the “ability to assess character and motivation.” The optimal arrangement is to find and exploit people who think they are making their own decisions while serving the recruiter's interests.

Whether enemy spymasters are watching Trump from Moscow, Beijing or Pyongyang, they must wake up every morning thanking Divine Providence for such an easy target as Donald Trump. His huge ego and his limited view of the world, often based on the weak arithmetic that earned him an infamous reputation for bankruptcies as a businessman, make him as president hugely vulnerable. Instead of making the United States great "again," he's making it weak as never before in our lifetimes.

The purpose of the alliances built by the United States over the last 70 years has been to extend American influence in times of peace and be force multipliers in times of war. They save American money, American manpower, and if it comes to a test of arms, American lives.

By undermining or eliminating those relationships Trump is creating a situation where any new military conflict will be vastly more expensive and dangerous. As a result, the United States may shrink from a confrontation, or indeed be outright defeated, especially if that conflict is with nuclear-armed Russia, China or North Korea. Meanwhile the many others who wish us ill — ISIS, Al Qaeda, Bashar al Assad, and Iran among them — will take heart.

Trump wants to see American allies paying more for their alliances. Up to a point this makes sense. Increased “burden sharing” has been the goal of many U.S. administrations. The idea was that the stronger the defenses of each member, the stronger the alliances.

But during Trump’s last trip to Europe his views on that subject became much clearer: He sees the American military as, essentially, an army of mercenaries paid by America’s allies to defend them. And it is perhaps more than coincidental that as Trump is ordering U.S. Special Forces out of Syria, Blackwater founder Erik Prince tells Fox Business they could be replaced by private contractors.

At Trump’s first NATO summit in May 2017, Trump talked as if NATO members were supposed to pay back dues, as if he were dunning Palm Beach residents who didn’t cough up the fees at Mar-a-Lago. This completely missed the point that the issue of burden sharing was about how big a proportion of a nation’s gross domestic product was consumed by its total defense spending.

The U.S. pours 3.6 percent of its GDP into defense. The target for all NATO members is 2 percent, but few meet it and Germany, the richest nation in Europe, spends only 1.2 percent. That said, the U.S. funds its military-industrial complex so it can project American power globally. None of the other NATO powers, even Britain and France, seriously pretend to such ambitions.

The New York Times reported on Monday that during the NATO summit in July last year, Trump actually considered pulling out of the organization altogether, which would effectively destroy it and hand Putin a huge strategic victory. That did not happen, not least because then-Defense Secretary James Mattis still dominated the internal debate on such issues. But when Trump returned to Europe in November, his position had evolved, or at least become more explicit.

Trump was furious with French President Emmanuel Macron for suggesting Europe should work harder to build its own defenses, which Macron found a little confusing since that is what Trump previously seemed to want.

In fact, Trump was reverting to an old, oft-repeated promise made during the 2016 campaign: “Countries that we're protecting have to pay what they're supposed to be paying." [Emphasis added.]

Trump doesn’t want NATO members to pay for their own defenses, he wants them to pay for the U.S. military to defend them. He wants them to buy American arms and underwrite the deployment of American soldiers, otherwise he’ll pack up and go home.

“It is time that these very rich countries either pay the United States for its great military protection, or protect themselves,” he tweeted after the Paris visit.
In the Middle East, this view of American soldiers as mercenaries in Donald Trump's employ fits nicely with the president's oft-stated desire to get more money out of the Saudis. Whenever confronted with the regime's increasingly murderous and erratic reputation, he falls back on promised arms sales of billions of dollars as justification for friendly relations.

The mercenary approach also meshes nicely with the Saudi view of warfare. The House of Saud and other Gulf states have long relied on hired cannon fodder from poorer countries to fight their wars. Most recently, Riyadh has been signing up underage boys from Sudan's devastated Darfur province to die in Yemen.

(It's obvious that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, despite the murder accusations leveled against him in the Khashoggi case, has joined the ranks of Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un as an accomplished Trump puppeteer.)

But right now the real testing ground for Trump's "deals" for the use of the U.S. military is not in Europe, where there remain some constraints on Trump’s impulses, nor in the Middle East. It’s in Korea.

At issue, just as Trump is beseeching North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for a second summit, is the U.S. president’s demand that South Korea double last year’s share of the costs of keeping America’s 28,500 troops in the country.

The South Koreans, after 10 tempestuous and futile rounds of talks with the Americans, are having none of it, and who can blame them? Trump wants a stupendous 100 percent increase in South Korea’s share, which came last year to about $860 million. And instead of asking for a deal that would last five years, as previously, he wants to be able to negotiate this thing every year.

The Chinese, Russians—and most of all the North Koreans—must be delighted. One of Kim’s key strategic goals has been to get those American troops off the peninsula and out of the region. But there's also a twist. South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in is anxious to be the leader who brought about reconciliation on the Korean peninsula, and he may actually be happy about the impasse if it means a significant portion of the Americans leave.

“South Korea has withdrawn its delegation from the talks,” says Kim Tae-woo, formerly head of the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses. “It gives [Moon] a chance to get closer to North Korea. We worry for the U.S.-South Korean alliance.”

While Trump obsesses over the costs, he seems oblivious to the importance of the U.S. troop presence. They “play a pivotal role in telling North Korea that they're a trip-wire, crossing of which could mean a war with the U.S.,” said Shim Jae-hoon, former Far Eastern Economic Review correspondent. “That's what the mutual defense treaty is for.”

Take them away and in the event of a North Korean blitz, nuclear or not, the game could be over before Washington could organize militarily or politically to oppose it.

For the record, a spokesperson for the South Korean ministry of foreign affairs, responsible for the U.S.-South Korea talks, said it was “a common belief between the two countries that it will not affect our strong relationship and firm commitment to the alliance.” Picking words carefully, she added, “In the spirit of mutual understanding and respect, both countries will do our utmost to come to an agreement on military cost-sharing.”

No doubt, but the long-term impact could be quite unsettling, as made clear by Kyle Ferrier of the Korea Economic Institute, a Washington think tank funded by the Korean government.

“The most significant cost of the stalled negotiations is the erosion of trust in the United States as a reliable security partner,” he wrote in The Diplomat. “While there is room for Seoul to pay more into the relationship, the approach taken by the Trump administration … risks long-term U.S. strategic interests by potentially driving South Korea to look elsewhere for its security needs.”

That’s a conclusion that seems unavoidable while Trump goes around the world sacrificing alliances and military understandings on the altar of uncertain economic benefits, unsubstantiated cost analyses and no real savings when balanced against the loss of friends and allies.
Christopher Dickey reported from Paris, Donald Kirk reported from Seoul.

[The Lawspeaker]

And, of course, prices are to be raised at random:

Critics Blast Trump ‘Protection Racket’ Offer as ‘Pure Idiocy’
By Kevin Baron Executive Editor Read bio March 8, 2019


The White House's "cost plus 50" plan would require allies to pay 150% of American troop costs. Former commanders say it only hurts U.S. interests.

From “colossal mistake” to “pure idiocy,” former senior U.S. military commanders on Friday slammed a White House proposal that reportedly would require treaty allies like Germany and Japan to pay up to 150 percent of the cost of hosting large numbers of American troops on bases in their countries.

It’s the latest and perhaps most extreme example of President Trump’s campaign promise to make the price of America’s security a key bargaining chip with countries like Japan, South Korea, and NATO allies. It’s also the latest example of the president’s more direct and emboldened leadership on military-related issues since his sudden and unilateral December decision to pull troops from Syria. The combination of those two factors means Trump’s unabashedly undiplomatic dealmaking style will test U.S.-Japan and U.S.-Europe relations — and U.S. military leaders’ resolve to stay out of politics and obey their commander in chief — even further. And if it wasn’t clear before, it is now: global security costs will be a top issue for the rest of this term.

It’s become exhausting to say once again that this president is challenging the international system and the assumptions of its keepers. Sometimes he has, sometimes he really has not. But this is a ground shifting proposal that truly would upend the international order of the past century. Some of Trump’s critics worried in fear last year that his squeezing of NATO members to pay 2 percent GDP was going to rip the alliance apart. It did not. But holding allied nations’ collective security (meaning: U.S. security) hostage for ransom, by demanding “premium” kickbacks, would test more than NATO’s resolve. And it comes one month shy of NATO’s 70th anniversary events, which are being hosted in Washington, DC.

If you support what Trump’s doing, then this is a clever attempt to bargain down Europe and Japan and make good on a campaign promise. It could get friendly nations to start paying a little more for their own defense (see: South Korea and NATO), which some believe is long overdue and what Democrats and Republicans alike have been wanting for years, if not as urgently as Trump. It also could shift some burden of global security off of the U.S. military, which remains an all-volunteer force of Americans isolated in a bubble and who critics increasingly argue cannot meet the security demands policy makers keep giving them. But shifting away the burden may also come at the cost of abdicating influence and leadership. That’s the other concern that has become almost cliche, that Trump’s in-your-eye ways will drive allies from Washington and inward, toward their own regional collectives or, worse, U.S. rivals adversaries.

Trump has focused on the military’s bottom line since before he was elected, when he quipped Japan and South Korea should retain their own nuclear weapons. As president, he consistently urges NATO members to meet their pledge to spend 2 percent of their GDPs on defense spending — which he erroneously calls NATO “dues” — even threatening or suggesting at times the U.S. may not fulfill it’s Article 5 obligation to defend NATO members who don’t pay up. And this week administration officials signed a new deal with South Korea increasing their reimbursement for the American troop presence there by 8 percent this year.

But the administration’s “cost plus 50” plan, first reported by Bloomberg, is an entirely different level of pressure that some critics liken to a protection racket and extortion.

“Yes…I’m very concerned about this,” said Ben Hodges, a retired 3-star general who was the most recent commanding general of U.S. Army Europe, in an email to Defense One. “It shows either a complete lack of understanding or a complete disregard for the value of the access we get from having bases in Europe … which are essential to our own security and for why we have any troops or capabilities that are stationed overseas. You can’t defend America from Virginia, North Carolina, and California.”

The U.S. military’s command headquarters for Europe and Africa, based in Stuttgart, “are not there to protect Germany,” said Hodges, who is Pershing Chair at the Center for European Policy Analysis, and partner at Berlin Global Advisors. They are forward deployed headquarters “that are essential for our own security. Where would we be without Ramstein AFB or Incirlik AFB? Or the Navy bases in the Med? Or the ability to deploy troops rapidly to trouble spots in Europe, the Middle East or Africa?”

“The U.S. does not have the capacity by ourselves to do everything we need to do to ensure our own security and the security of critical spaces and assets…we need allies…and our most reliable allies come from Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, and ROK. Why do we constantly bash them?”

Mark Hertling, also a retired 3-star Army general who held the same Europe command post as Hodges, said in a tweet, “It’s pure idiocy. Only the uninformed would support this.”

President Obama’s former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro said, “Trump’s ridiculous demand to treat our European bases as a protection racket could, when refused, be the basis for him to do what he longs to do — pull the US out of NATO.”

“Hard to imagine a more self-defeating step or one more at odds with American values,” said Gordon Trowbridge, a former spokesman for the Pentagon and Sen. Carl Levin, Senate Armed Services Committee. “We should deploy troops for one reason: Because it helps keep America safe. The US military is not a protection racket.”

Julie Smith, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and former deputy national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, said, “A horrible idea sure to backfire and leave America less safe, less trusted, and with less global reach. The US military doesn’t station troops overseas out of the goodness of their hearts. It does so because it serves America’s interests.”

It’s unclear just how serious this proposal is, and the White House publicly will not discuss this one. But given the president’s moves against NATO and South Korea already, it sure feels like a trial balloon.

“Getting allies to increase their investment in our collective defense and ensure fairer burden-sharing has been a long-standing U.S. goal,” said National Security Council spokesman Garrett Marquis. “The administration has prioritized this issue: for example the president has pushed NATO allies to meet the Alliance’s 2 percent of GDP on defense spending guideline, which is resulting in a total of $100 billion in new defense spending. The administration is committed to getting the best deal for the American people elsewhere too, but will not comment on any ongoing deliberations regarding specific ideas.”

At the Pentagon, Friday morning, reporters peppered spokesman Charlie Summers.
“I know that the NSC has something on that,” he said. “Those are classified conversations and I can’t get into that.”
Katie Bo Williams contributed to this report.

[Petros Houhoulis]

Trump has blown the lid, finally. He might get his wish of dissolving NATO after all...

[The Lawspeaker]

^ And then he will get an America that will have a force projection like it had in 1941... and without a friend in the world. Should be fun to see the Republicans explain that to their electorate: "Sorry.. but without forward basis in Europe or Greenland, the Russians can attack us any time they want and we wouldn't even know it until they are half-way across the Atlantic".

[The Lawspeaker]

U.S. envoy warns Germany: Pay more or risk losing protection


Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, walks from the tarmac after greeting U.S. Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo, second from left, at Tegel Airport in Berlin in May.
(AFP/Getty Images)


By Erik Kirschbaum

Aug. 9, 2019
3:32 PM

BERLIN — President Trump’s envoy to Berlin openly criticized Germany on Friday, accusing it of failing to pull its weight on defense spending and suggesting that the 50,000 American troops stationed in NATO’s largest European nation could be moved to Poland — a move that could raise tensions with Russia even further.

Ambassador Richard Grenell said in an interview with the German news agency DPA that U.S. patience was running out after successive U.S. presidents had in vain urged Germany — long a close NATO ally — to do more for its own security. It follows Grenell’s criticism of Germany recently for its refusal to take part in a U.S.-led naval mission in the Persian Gulf.
“It is offensive to assume that the U.S. taxpayers continue to pay for more than 50,000 Americans in Germany but the Germans get to spend their [budget] surplus on domestic programs,” Grenell was quoted telling DPA, comments which made waves in Germany and were confirmed by the U.S. Embassy.

Germany’s defense spending has long been a point of contention between the two allies. And its fighter jets, tanks and submarines are in a woeful state of disrepair. But no U.S. president or ambassador has ever spoken out as bluntly as Grenell. Trump will visit Europe twice in the next four weeks: France for a Group of 7 meeting, and then Denmark and Poland, where fears of Russian military action are more acute than in major Western European countries.

The German government has posted growing budget surpluses for the last six years, and the country’s economy, Europe’s largest, has enjoyed strong growth for nearly a decade. More than half its gross domestic product is exported. But the country with a now-deeply ingrained aversion to war and military expenditures has fallen far short of its 2014 pledge to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to raise defense spending to 2% of GDP by 2024.

Germany, the 29-nation alliance’s second-largest member behind the U.S., has no plan in place to get to 2%. It expects to spend 1.36% of GDP on defense in 2019 and that is expected to drop to 1.24% in 2024, while most other NATO members reach the 2% target. The United States spends 3.3% of its GDP on defense.
Along with U.S. nuclear missiles based in Germany, there are more American forces in Germany than in any other country in Europe: 35,000 soldiers along with 17,000 American civilians. Some 12,000 German civilians work in jobs connected to the U.S. military.

In June, Trump said he would shift 1,000 U.S. troops from bases in Western Europe to Poland, joining about 4,000 U.S. soldiers who rotate in and out of Poland.

The U.S. ambassador to Poland, Georgette Mosbacher, recently tweeted in support of moving U.S. troops from Germany to Poland.

Poland meets its 2% of GDP spending obligation towards NATO. Germany does not. We would welcome American troops in Germany to come to Poland.
— Georgette Mosbacher (@USAmbPoland) August 8, 2019

“President Trump is right and Georgette Mosbacher is right,” Grenell said. “Multiple presidents have asked the largest economy in Europe to share the burden of its own defense. This is a request that has been made over many years and by many U.S. administrations. We have reached a point where Americans and the U.S. president must react.”

Such a move could have far-reaching security consequences in Europe. When NATO began expanding in the 1990s to take in countries that had been Soviet satellites during the Cold War, the alliance promised not to permanently station combat forces in Central Europe unless security conditions changed, a pledge that Moscow says NATO has violated.
Since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and backed separatist groups in Ukraine, the Pentagon and NATO have built up forces in Central Europe, hoping to reassure nervous alliance members that the bloc would come to their defense, as promised in the NATO charter, if directly threatened by Russia. Ukraine is not a member of the alliance.

Claudia Major, a senior associate and defense analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, said that the United States was right to single out Germany for criticism for its insufficient defense spending but warned that public criticism could damage NATO unity.

“While the criticism regarding the sad state of German defense spending in general is justified, I think we should be very careful about these debates,” she said in an interview. “Who benefits if NATO and the transatlantic community is divided? Who benefits if Trump plays off one ally against another? NATO’s enemies!”

German media reports about Grenell’s comments stirred considerable reaction. Hundreds of readers on Spiegel Online’s website applauded Grenell’s suggestion, urging him personally to leave the country along with the American forces. Several wrote “good riddance,” and some even offered to help the soldiers pack up their equipment.
“Go home … and take your Ambassador with you,” wrote a user under the name Captain Crow.

---

[Epirus DNA]

And that's Trump's real problem. NATO is not an alliance but a protection racket where Europeans are "supposed" to pay for American weapons and the "promise" of American protection while they are having their Turkish bed buddies open the borders and flood us with terrorists citing 1950s international laws they made us sign. In other words: America is like the Mafia - "pay us or we will burn down your shop !" Let's dump NATO and make our own weapons to protect ourselves and our fellow European neighbours..

This is how the Trump Administration works---
Trump is the worlds #1 Mob Boss and he uses the US military as Buttons for his own personal gain.
Trump needs to get impeached and removed from office.

[Epirus DNA]

Trump has blown the lid, finally. He might get his wish of dissolving NATO after all...

I think this is Putin's order for his lackey Trump to follow. Putin owns Trump.

[Petros Houhoulis]

^ And then he will get an America that will have a force projection like it had in 1941... and without a friend in the world. Should be fun to see the Republicans explain that to their electorate: "Sorry.. but without forward basis in Europe or Greenland, the Russians can attack us any time they want and we wouldn't even know it until they are half-way across the Atlantic".

I guess that Trump shall have to buy Greenland after all, and at a very steep price... But he won't get Iceland for sure.

[The Lawspeaker]

I guess that Trump shall have to buy Greenland after all, and at a very steep price... But he won't get Iceland for sure.

He wouldn't get Greenland either and since it is so strategically important, any attempts to seize it from Denmark would, very likely, be rewarded with a Russian military intervention.