Donald Trump entered his war of choice against Iran without consulting global allies, but as he weighs an exit from the conflict, he is making it clear that he is expecting the world to help him fix the unintended damage that it has caused.
Trump is taking an increasingly annoyed tone toward Europe’s lack of support for the U.S.-Israeli war effort. He also is giving short shrift to the fact that his decision contributed to disrupting the flow of oil to global markets through the crucial Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has managed to largely choke off even as Trump insists that Iran has been “decimated.”
I’d hope NATO actually makes a clear distinction between aggressors and defenders in a war. Trump has already twisted ‘national threat’ to justify whatever he wants, and while his own country seems fine with it, I can’t imagine international allies just going along with that kind of logic
NATO is a defensive alliance. It was used only once (right after 9/11).
In the past individual nations can choose to help, but that’s outside of NATO’s purpose.
No nation wants to help because 1) few months he threatened to attack NATO 2) the mess he created is massive and also no one trusts US government to be competent right now, so getting involved will only end up with even bigger losses
So basically, it has nothing to do with NATO really… How come he things it has?
He is doing what putin asks. Putin loves creating dilemmas.
The ideal (for putin) scenario would be to have Europe to decide between getting oil from Russia (this is why trump lifted sanctions) or get involved in Middle East.
Both of those would lead to decreased support for Ukraine, first one he could threaten to cut oil off they didn’t, the second would be very unpopular with public and Russia would exploit isolationist tendencies.
I’m actually glad that it looks like Ukraine is bombing Baltic terminals and Europe realized that greeting involved in the mess trump started will make things even worse.
And yeah there are people saying “how can trump new helping Russia when he attacked Venezuela and Iran who are Russian allies” the answer to it is to look if those actions helped putin or hurt putin.
In Venezuela he removed Maduro but kept the old Russian friendly government.
Iran it massively helped. The oil prices spiked when previously Russia was selling at a loss, by helping Iran Russia still is seen as ally and now US is dragged to the same war Russia sights with Ukraine (ideally he would want rest of NATO be dragged there too).
He didn’t understand that he couldn’t make deals with individual countries in the EU in his first term and badgered Merkel about it repeatedly despite being told. So he doesn’t understand it, wilfully or otherwise … but he’s also surrounded himself with people that don’t understand it either.
People like Trump don’t use this type of talk to gain a better understanding or to communicate truth or ideas. They use it to get what they want, which is why his statements are jarring to people that pay any decent attention.
“The strait is fine” is to try to calm the stock market – but – “NATO needs to help the strait” is to get other people to fix his fuck up