News Release

What Trump is Right About: NATO

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ABC reports: “Donald Trump Gets Bipartisan Condemnation for NATO Comments.”

DAVID N. GIBBS, dgibbs[at]arizona.edu
Author of First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, Gibbs is a professor of history and government at the University of Arizona. He has written extensively on NATO.

Gibbs said today: “Trump’s recent criticisms of the NATO alliance are reasonable. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has provoked post-communist Russia into a stance of belligerence vis-a-vis the United States and its Western allies. The new Cold War with Russia resulted from NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders, in violation of a 1990 U.S. commitment that it would not expand NATO. Trump is right to question NATO’s value in promoting U.S. security, and also to raise the issue of the enormous financial cost of this alliance to the U.S. taxpayer. While Trump’s views on foreign policy are often dangerous, his positions on NATO seem quite sensible. He is raising an issue that no mainstream political figure is willing to address, and this will hopefully trigger a long overdue debate on the value (or lack of value) of America’s overseas military presence.”

See by Robert Parry: “The Bigger Nuclear Risk: Trump or Clinton?” and “Turkey Provokes Russia with Shoot-down.”

See by Mary Elise Sarotte: “A Broken Promise? What the West Really Told Moscow About NATO Expansion.”