Donald Trump sparked a scandal when he claimed that if he were president again, the United States would break with the principle of mutual assistance that is at the core of NATO. This principle is simple: aggression against one of the NATO member states must be viewed by each member state as aggression against its own territory.
• Also read: Climbing or familiar air? NATO faces Trump's threats
I quote Trump's comments as reported in Le Figaro.
Rich
“One of the presidents of a great country […] said to me: “If we don't pay and are attacked by Russia, will you protect us?” I said: “You haven't paid, are you in debt? […] No, I wouldn't protect you. In fact, I would encourage Russia to do whatever it wants. You have to pay””.
The formula was brutal and caricatured, as Trump always is.
But fundamentally it says a lot about the evolution of the United States' geopolitical vision.
- Listen to the meeting of Mathieu Bock-Côté and Richard Martineau QUB :
It is not new that the United States has demanded that its allies take its defense seriously. It was inevitable that one day Americans would no longer want to pay.
This is all the more true as we are experiencing a paradigm shift in foreign policy in the USA.
Proponents of US imperial leadership are more interested in Asia than in Europe, which for them is a thing of the past. It is not certain whether the Ukraine war marks a lasting revival of interest in the Old Continent.
Photo AFP
Trump card
On the other side of the political spectrum, Trump wants to break with the idea of an American empire and advocates for the country's withdrawal through an attitude that mixes unilateralism, hostile to any form of global governance, with a new isolationism.
In other words, the Cold War world is no longer ours. The Atlantic disturbance is expanding. Whatever we think, it is important to adapt to it.