A death knell for NATO: Project 2025 calls for Trump to "restructure" US foreign policy

A death knell for NATO: Project 2025 calls for Trump to "restructure" US foreign policy
The plan is for Donald Trump to "reset the nation’s role in the world"

By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
Columnist
PUBLISHED JULY 10, 2024 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) We haven't seen much of Donald Trump lately but he did poke his head up Tuesday to speak at a little rally he held at his Doral golf resort, almost certainly paid for by his campaign so any profits are put directly into his pocket. (Too bad he's stiffed so many of the other venues that have hosted him but that's just his way.) It wasn't anything special. He sounded as unhinged as usual, delivering his greatest hits to a hot and wilted but adoring Florida crowd.

He admitted that when he became president he didn't even know what NATO was before he launched into his tiresome rant about making the alliance countries pay their dues (they don't have dues) and reiterating that he told some unnamed foreign leader that he wouldn't defend them against Russian aggression if they were "delinquent."

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

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Setting aside all the current drama over Biden's candidacy, when it comes to his presidency there is simply no comparison between his performance on the world stage and Donald Trump's. Trump was a dangerously ignorant embarrassment with a strange need to beg and scrape for approval from dictators and tyrants like some sad little flunky trying to impress the playground bully. Part of his suck-up performance was to browbeat America's allies to impress the despots whose attention he craved. NATO was his favorite punching bag for obvious reasons. His idol Vladimir Putin is its sworn enemy.

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There are people at Project 2025 thinking about how to change the direction of America's foreign policy, however, and it's not much better. Generally speaking those writing on national security and foreign policy are concentrating on many of the same culture war issues that the domestic policy planners are obsessed with. They want to take a wrecking ball to all the institutions and replace the personnel, including the officer corps of the military, whom they claim have weakened the services with their "woke" attitudes. Virtually the entire State Department will also have to go because they are similarly seen as a bunch of wimpy liberals who don't recognize the great strategic brilliance of Donald Trump. It recommends that all treaty negotiations halt immediately for re-evaluation by the president and it appears that they feel perfectly comfortable reneging on any agreements they don't believe serve "the national interest," which will be defined by Trump, the man who sees the entire world as one big potential real estate con. They say, "the next conservative President has the opportunity to restructure the making and execution of U.S. defense and foreign policy and reset the nation’s role in the world." Yikes. ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/07/10/a-knell-for-nato-project-2025-calls-for-to-restructure-us-foreign-policy/