{"id":290548,"date":"2017-01-18T07:11:01","date_gmt":"2017-01-18T06:11:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/nato-and-obsolescence-donald-trump-and-the-history-of-an-alliance\/"},"modified":"2017-01-18T07:11:01","modified_gmt":"2017-01-18T06:11:01","slug":"nato-and-obsolescence-donald-trump-and-the-history-of-an-alliance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/nato-and-obsolescence-donald-trump-and-the-history-of-an-alliance\/","title":{"rendered":"NATO and Obsolescence: Donald Trump and the History of an Alliance"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>It should be a point of some delicious reflection for peace activists who have fought for decades against the nature of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.\u00a0 It brought the US deep into West European affairs, turning European states into garrisons.\u00a0 It involved the stationing of nuclear weapons. It compelled member states to go to war if the security of any one was threatened or breached.<\/p>\n<p>Donald Trump, however, has little time for it.\u00a0 Selecting the <em>Bild <\/em>newspaper and the <em>Times of London<\/em> as forums to expand on his views on NATO, the President-elect decided to shake the tree that much more.<\/p>\n<p>America First as an idea means that the alliance system needs to be reviewed.\u00a0 For one, Trump took issue with military spending from the members, suggesting that it did not even make 2 percent of gross domestic product.<\/p>\n<p>But for Trump, the core issue was utility.\u00a0 What had the alliance actually done?\u00a0 Ever in the zone of the next news entertainment cycle, Trump felt that the alliance had done little on the issue of dealing with terrorism.<\/p>\n<p>It was, in his carefree words, \u201cobsolete because it wasn\u2019t taking care of terror.\u201d It had been \u201cdesigned many, many years ago.\u201d\u00a0 Just to confuse readers, and perhaps himself, Trump then explained that NATO was still \u201cvery important to me.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Obsolescence is probably not quite the term. If it had just been a museum piece, a historical reminder, little fuss would be made.\u00a0 In actual fact, this was an alliance which&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/2017\/01\/nato-and-obsolescence-donald-trump-and-the-history-of-an-alliance\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It should be a point of some delicious reflection for peace activists who have fought for decades against the nature of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.\u00a0 It brought the US deep into West European affairs, turning European states into garrisons.\u00a0 It involved the stationing of nuclear weapons. It compelled member states to go to war [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2525,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-290548","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2525"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}