The whole Europe is watching with dismay president Donald Trump’s furious reckoning with its main European allies, whom he accuses of being a bunch of ungrateful bastards, not doing enough to shoulder the burden of defending the West against Russia. The angry tweets yesterday and the earful he gave NATO secretary Jens Stoltenberg today seem however mostly directed at his fan-base at home. The people who voted for him, those who were sold to the promise of ‘America First’. He seems to be speaking to Joe Public, and Joe Public is rightfully outraged to be spending a whole lot of money to defend the ungrateful Europeans.
The US are spending far more than their European allies on defence, 3.5% of their GDP, as opposed to Europeans who barely spend 2%. Germany is roughly at 1.24%. If you put it like that, yes, the US is spending far more.
The problem is the huge US defence budget is not actually being spent on protecting us European scumbags from Russia. It’s not used on defence at all, but on attack - think Iraq and Syria, for instance. The American taxpayer’s money, Joe Public’s many taxes went into leveling Afghanistan to the ground, destroying Iraq for no reason. Most recently, the US conducted a series of bombardments on Syrian government positions in retaliation for fake gas attacks against civilians. Each of the missiles used costs millions of dollars. The American taxpayer ultimately footed the bill for all these wars, yet now Trumps comes to Europe guns blazing, accusing all of us the US defence budget is so huge because of us.
Not to mention the fact all NATO members have been dragged in the wars America unleashed, simply because that’s what allies do, they stick together. Does Yugoslavia ring any bells? The US dragged NATO into that.
The unfortunate UK prime minister Theresa May just reminded Trump of this fact - even if the UK falls behind on defence spending (being thus on Trump’s shit list), fact is that London always stepped up when the US sounded the call. I’m sure you remember Tony Blair’s efforts to convince European countries to get involved in Iraq, a place we had no business being.
Just an example of where does the US defence budget goes - Syria!
Another issue - by ordering Europeans to increase defence spending, Trump is nothing but a bullish salesman for the US war industry, because if us European were to buy more attack helicopters and radars we wouldn’t be buying them from Russia, would we? If there’s money to be made, it’s not for Joe Public, it’s for the military complex.
If the US has had enough of spending that much money on defence, the US could simply stop doing that. Scale back the budget to 2% and use the rest of the money for something Joe Public might actually benefit from. I don’t know, building new hospitals for the US veterans, left to fend for themselves now that they’re no longer useful? But then, the war machine wouldn’t be making enough money.
Finally, president Trump’s concern with defence money would ring true if he ordered a real and thorough review of all the funds the Pentagon seems to have lost track of. I’m not going to go into conspiracy theory, just take a look at this Forbes article.
The title should be enough to make Joe Public mad -‘Has Our Government Spent $21 Trillion Of Our Money Without Telling Us?’
We’re talking trillions of government money unaccounted for!That’s way more than Trump could expect of some poor European nations to fork out, yet you don’t see the US president raging over all that money and where the fuck did it go?
His bullying might get some Europeans increase their defence spending, but in the end Joe Public would be better served if president Trump put his own house in order and held some people accountable for the use of public money.
And Joe Public could step up himself and, instead of vilifying us Europeans, he could ask his president what the fuck is he doing in places like Syria or maybe Iran, who knows? For if war hawks have their way, a good deal of the US ‘defence’ budget might end up not defending us Europeans, but unleashing bombs over Iran.