Trump told European leaders that US ‘will never come to help you’

breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca to politics @lemmy.world – 544 points –
Trump told European leaders that US ‘will never come to help you’
theguardian.com

Donald Trump told the president of the European Commission in 2020 that the US would “never come help” if Europe was attacked and also said “Nato is dead”, a senior European commissioner said.

Multiple news outlets said the exchange between Trump and Ursula von der Leyen at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2020 was described in Brussels on Tuesday by Thierry Breton, a French European commissioner responsible for the internal market, with responsibilities including defence.

“You need to understand that if Europe is under attack we will never come to help you and to support you,” Trump said, according to Breton, who was speaking at the European parliament.

According to Breton, Trump also said: “By the way, Nato is dead, and we will leave, we will quit Nato.”

Archive

99

You are viewing a single comment

On the other hand, why is Europe depending on the US for their own defense?

They’re not. That’s kind of a weird thing to say, if you have any understanding of the situation.

The point of NATO is to present a unified front against the ever-present authoritarian threat in the region that’s been ongoing since WWII, and the US as a founding member has spent more on their military by orders of magnitude, so has had an outsized voice in NATO.

If they pull out those resources, that would hurt the coalition because, again, with their military spending being more than ten times the next ten countries combined, they’re the silverback gorilla in the room, and losing that against countries willing to throw their entire population as human cannon fodder into conflicts because they don’t care about human costs would hurt a lot. What happens when Russia decides to reclaim the rest of the countries Putin thinks are rightly part of their federation, because Putin has delusions of becoming an historical tsar? What happens when Trump’s US backs Putin in that effort?

Your few guns will not fix any of this. Your few guns will not even help stave off anything in your own county. That’s never how this has worked. This will be ushered in while you get your groceries and watch Netflix, with no clear enemy to fight, after an authoritarian has been voted in as president, as everything else is just a Tuesday.

I appreciate that you think you can head off the next major fascist regime because you’re armed, but that’s not how this works. You will never have a target to shoot at. You will be just like average Germans in the 1930s, waiting for the moment it has gone too far, and then in the late 40s trying to figure out when that moment actually happened.

e: also, there are no ‘orange shirts’. Your terminology is tres bizarre. It’s Brownshirts or red caps. That’s an embarrassing mistake to make.

I mostly agree with your response, except for chastising OP about the color of the shirt. They start by mentioning brown, then parenthetically say "orange" as an unveiled reference to Trump.

This is because Trump is known to use a LOT of bronzer that turns his skin an unusual orange color. So what OP was trying to do was to relate the brownshirts to the presumed task force that Trump would create if he became a dictator.

It wasn’t about the colour of the shirt; that’s what you took from my comment?

lol okay, my point had nothing at all to do with colours.

Brownshirt == fascist paramilitary force

Redcap == fascist paramilitary force

Orange shirt == ?? Uh, maybe someone who should retake cosmetics finals?

e: Oohh, you’re ai right? That’s something to be proud of I guess. (I’m joking)

1 more...
1 more...

Your few guns will not fix any of this. Your few guns will not even help stave off anything in your own county. That’s never how this has worked. This will be ushered in while you get your groceries and watch Netflix, with no clear enemy to fight, after an authoritarian has been voted in as president, as everything else is just a Tuesday.

OP knows this deep down. People who cling to guns and control over their personal property do so because they feel out of control as to the big things, and if they are honest they can admit it.

1 more...