International security

Rachel Marsden: Europe questioning the heavy price for playing along with US regime change

 If there’s one theme the Trump administration has been consistent about, it’s that Europe has to start paying for its rideshare costs down the American regime-change superhighway.

Except U.S. President Donald Trump hasn’t put it in those terms, exactly. No one ever does. But the reality is that what experts call the “Transatlantic Alliance” has largely been reduced to a folie à deux, culminating in attempted defenestrations of other heads of state. It hasn’t worked out too well.

NATO is the organization under which Europe and the U.S. attempt to diffuse any national responsibility for failed regime-change efforts — from Libya and Afghanistan to Iraq and Ukraine. The multinational nature of the efforts permits leaders from each of the individual member states to largely absolve themselves from accountability in elections by saying that the bungled efforts weren’t their doing but rather were undertaken by the “international community.”

Although he campaigned on reducing American military interventionism, Trump has repeatedly called for NATO countries to kick in more cash. Perhaps he hasn’t fully thought this through, because it seems contrary to Trump’s vows to reduce American involvement in inciting and sustaining foreign conflicts.

What existential military threat do Europe and North America face that requires more money to be thrown at it? The dirty little secret is that there isn’t one. By negating this fact, Trump reduces himself to little more than a preacher trying to guilt the faithful into coughing up more cash for the collection plate, believing that they’ll pay purely out of habit and ideology.