The hits just keep on coming.
There is a new sheriff in town, the old order is crumbling, and we are afraid the world is going to become much more unstable in the next few years. Assets markets are incapable of discounting or pricing it in.
President Trump Throws Montenegro Under The Bus
In an interview with Fox’s Tucker Carlson last night, President Trump seemed to question the raison d’être of NATO and foreign alliances in general.
Tucker: So membership in NATO obligates the members to defend any member that is attacked. So let’s say Montenegro, who joined last year, is attacked, why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack?
President Trump: I understand what you are saying. I have asked the same question. You know Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people… They may get aggressive, and congratulations you are in World War III…But that is the way it was set up, don’t forget I just got here.
There are errors and misrepresentations in the above, such as NATO’s Article 5, which has only been invoked once in the aftermath of 9/11, and does not apply when the NATO member is the aggressor.
NATO Expansion Was A Mistake
Before going further let us state for the record, we believe the expansion of NATO without including Russia was a big mistake, unnecessarily provocative, and ruined the West chances of bringing Russia “in.”
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the sudden shift in the military balance in Europe in the early 1990’s, NATO faced an existential crisis. Rather than winding down, the conventional wisdom was that NATO must go “out of area or out of business.” Bureaucracies don’t die easily.
The Russian backlash to NATO’s expansion was devastating. In 1991, 80 percent of the Russian public had a favorable opinion of the United States. After the expansion of the alliance and bombing of Serbia in 1999 without UN Security Council authorization, Russians had a negative view of America. In 2000, Vladimir Putin was elected president of the Russian Federation.
George Kennen
Listen to George Kennen in 1998, the architect of America’s successful containment of the Soviet Union and one of America’s great statesmen of the 20th century, who was “present at the creation” of NATO, and authored the anonymous 1947 Foreign Affairs article, signed ”X,” defining America’s cold-war policy for 40 years,
”I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have...