Saturday, July 13, 2024

Enough of the ‘Trump-Proofing’ NATO Talk

  American Greatness (amgreatness.com)  "Donald Trump will have a lot of work to do to reestablish American leadership and responsible security alliances if he wins the 2024 election."

The talk of “Trump-proofing” NATO at the Washington summit also represents NATO members trying to politicize the alliance to tie the hands of a potential U.S. president they dislike.  

"Two issues dominated this week’s NATO summit in Washington, hosted by President Biden: the war in Ukraine and Donald Trump’s likely reelection. NATO members badly misplayed both issues.

"The summit went off course at the start when President Biden insisted in his opening address that Ukraine can “prevail” in the war with Russia if it receives the arms it needs. Biden claimed Ukraine “can and will stop Putin.” The president announced that the U.S. would send Ukraine five new strategic air defense systems and F-16 fighters. Biden first made this promise in May 2023, but the jets never arrived.

"In his speech, Biden was again in denial about the state of the war. Ukraine had a chance to push back Russian troops and recover its territory in the spring and summer of 2022. However, the United States and other NATO members limited their military aid to Ukraine in 2022 out of fear of escalating the conflict. As a result, Ukraine’s arsenal ran low by October 2022, which gave Russian forces a chance to regroup and heavily fortify their lines. Ukraine never regained a strategic advantage in the war, and the conflict became a stalemate by late 2022.

"As a result, many experts on the right and left assessed, starting in 2023, that the conflict had become a long-term war of attrition that Ukraine would eventually lose at great cost. Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass and Georgetown University Professor Charles Kupchan argued in an April 2023 Foreign Affairs article that the West needed a new strategy to get from the battlefield to the negotiating table in the Ukraine War because “the most likely outcome of the conflict is not a complete Ukrainian victory but a bloody stalemate.” Their recommendation was for the Biden administration to prioritize ending the Ukraine war by pressing for a cease-fire and peace talks

"Donald Trump has long realized this and has pledged to end the war in 24 hours if he’s elected president again. With the growing chance that Trump will win the 2024 election, Russian and Ukrainian leaders are taking Trump’s promise seriously." . . .

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