Pentagon Outlines Ways to Punish NATO Over Refusal to Join War
The Department of Defense is brainstorming ways to punish NATO members who didn’t support President Donald Trump’s war with Iran. Reuters, citing an unnamed U.S. government official, reports that the federal government is considering suspending Spain from the transatlantic alliance and reevaluating the United Kingdom’s claim to the Falkland Islands. The official told the news agency that these options were laid out in an internal Pentagon email. The Trump administration is upset at NATO countries who have refused to grant the U.S. access to their bases or rights to their airspaces for the Iran war. The email, circulating at the highest levels of the DOD, reportedly said that those rights are “just the absolute baseline for NATO.” If the U.S. wants to suspend member countries like Spain, it will likely run into pushback from other NATO members. One NATO official told Reuters that “NATO’s Founding Treaty does not foresee any provision for suspension of NATO membership.” When asked about the email, the Pentagon’s press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, replied, “As President Trump has said, despite everything that the United States has done for our NATO allies, they were not there for us.”“The War Department will ensure that the President has credible options to ensure that our allies are no longer a paper tiger and instead do their part. We have no further comment on any internal deliberations to that effect,” Wilson said.Trump has repeatedly criticized NATO even prior to the Iran war, repeatedly threatening to leave the alliance over petty grievances such as countries rebuffing his desire to “take” Greenland. In recent weeks, he has complained that NATO members won’t help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. On April 1, he again told Reuters that he was “absolutely, without question” considering leaving the organization.But that would likely require approval from Congress, and Trump would have to go around them and invoke presidential authority over foreign policy, which would face legal challenges. And taking punitive action against our own allies would result in backlash domestically and abroad. But Trump does not respect longstanding alliances, and if he feels slighted, blowing them up is a strong possibility.