this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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As I always said, the US never cared about the defense expenditure of European countries except as a way to bolster US exports.
It was always about extortion and never about defense.
Yep, they were fine with 'footing the bill for European defense' as long as enough members bought F35s and whatever other pointless toys the US produced. Only France basically stuck with producing everything domestically.
Trump never really understood what that unspoken part of the bargain really was about. If Europe is going to actually spend 2% of GDP, they're going to keep that money domestically as much as possible instead of sending all that spending overseas in dollars.
Trump never really understood that most US "aid" is literally the US gov recycling old ordinance and equipment to continue siphoning tax dollars into the military industrial complex and it's oligarchs — expenses DOGE have not touched and do not consider "waste"... for some, certainly not fascist imperialism, reason...
You could have stopped there.
You'd think a businessman as bigly smart (people tell him all the time, many people) as he is would understand this.
I still don't know if he's just stupid or if he's just doing what Putin wants by undermining NATO. I guess both could be true at the same time.
He's a dealer, not a businessman. Deal ≠ business economics ≠ national economics ≠ global economics.
If you apply the "art of the deal" to the global economy, you'll wreck it. Well, if you apply his "art of the deal", you'll wreck basically anything except you're own wallet.
A del would imply he’s good at negotiation. He isn’t. He’s good at leveraging people, but mostly that’s been illegal. If he was good at deals, he wouldn’t have messed up international relations, which is deal making, but more complex. He’s a rich kid that fell upwards and inspired a cult following through sheer luck.