At a rally in South Carolina recently, Donald Trump made some comments about Nato that predictably launched the usual NeverTrump suspects into stratospheric dudgeon. Recalling a conversation he claims he had with a Nato “president of a big country,” Trump told him that if Nato nations continued to stint their military spending and kept failing to meet the 2% of GDP requirement, ‘“No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.’”

The Wall Street Journal claimed such typical Trumpian caustic hyperbole will be “the reason many Americans won’t vote for him again even against a mentally declining President Biden,” but this prediction is highly unlikely, unless the editors define “many Americans” as the bipartisan political elite. I seriously doubt that some Trumpian trolling will even be remembered by most voters eight months from now.

More important than squawking over Trump being Trump is the uncritical, reverential acceptance of the Nato Treaty’s Article Five, which is a classic example of what James Madison called a “parchment barrier”–– like most treaties, a political document whose terms will be regularly violated. Consider its actual language:

“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”

The highlighted phrases challenge the sacred aura many defenders of the “world’s oldest military alliance” evoke when scolding Donald Trump. After all, what each member state “deems necessary” could range from oratorical bluster and endless “diplomatic engagement,” to serially voting for toothless UN resolutions and participating in Swiss-cheese economic sanctions. And notice how “including the use of armed force” makes actual fighting a mere option.

The lack in the treaty of an obligation that each member state mobilize its military and declare war on the offender, weakens it substantially. That’s because sovereign nations look first to their own national interests and security, and will ignore a treaty’s terms when both are put at risk. But if Nato had written that each state was required to send its citizens to actually fight and die for other states, the treaty wouldn’t exist today.

Next, the NeverTrumpers’ fits over comments made during an encounter that Trump probably invented, however, are more about their uncontrollable neurosis than the question of Nato’s flaws and usefulness. It also bespeaks several mythic claims about the “rules-based international order” and its transnational institutions, privileging of “diplomatic engagement,” multilateral treaties, and preference for supranational policies at the expense of national interests.

Hence the endlessly recycled cliché that popped up in the National Review’s editorial about Trump’s comments. Nato, it claimed, “held the line in Western Europe throughout the Cold War, and it did so peacefully, saving countless U.S. lives.” Actually, what “held the line” were tens of thousands of American nuclear warheads, and hundreds of thousands of forward deployed Americans soldiers, both the backbone of the strategy of containment, which in turn depended on MAD––“mutually assured destruction”––that ushered the Soviet Union into the dustbin of history.

Moreover, given how rich the Nato nations had become by 1970, their failure to spend enough on defense, even as they splurged on social welfare spending, was shameful. Complaints about the feckless Europeans became a regular political issue. For example, in 1970, Montana Democratic Senator Mike Mansfield published a column calling for the “Europeanization” of NATO, in order to reduce the costs of American troops stationed in Europe.

This problem of chintzy European defense-spending worsened after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The so-called “peace dividend” allowed Nato nations to justify further reducing military spending, and to rationalize the cuts by touting the “rules based international order” and its idealistic foreign policy doctrines that allegedly ended the Cold War “peacefully”–– an adverb that would have come as a surprise to the more than 100,000 Americans killed just in the Korea and Vietnam proxy wars of containment.

And just as American nuclear weapons and American fighting men kept the peace, it was Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and the millions of brave Eastern Europeans dissidents they inspired, who won the Cold War. Reagan and Thatcher backed up diplomacy, negotiations, and “soft power” with a credible threat of new and more lethal armaments, dooming the communist USSR.

Putin’s occupation of eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014 did wake the Nato sleepwalkers enough to make a rule requiring members to spend at least 2% of GDP on military preparedness. But as usual with such multinational agreements, no provisions were made to punish slackers, including semi-pacifist Germany, the world’s 3^rd largest economy and one of Nato’s worst cheapskates. The nations who did comply tended to be poorer, East European countries like Poland and Greece. The continuing problem of European nations’ feckless military spending even provoked card-carrying globalist Barack Obama to call them “free riders.”

Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine also sparked a brief flurry of realism about spending money on defense. Germany boasted of a “turning point,” a recovery of Europe’s military nerve. But as usual, the U.S. still leads the way, spending more on Ukraine than the rest of Nato combined. But Biden has slow-walked necessary munitions, especially the fighter jets Ukraine must have to achieve a significant pushback of Russia’s forces.

Moreover, at the same time, lunatic “net-zero carbon” energy policies threaten Europe’s economies, a problem worsened by Biden’s plan to nix development of American liquid natural gas export terminals, risking Europe again becoming dependent on Russia and Iran for energy.

So the problem of defense-spending continues to impair Nato’s usefulness. Nor should we be surprised. All the lofty principles of the “new world order” rarely can override a nation’s economic interests, and politicians who ignore them don’t last long. This has long been a truth of representative governments elected by their citizens. In Aristophanes’ Knights (424 B.C.), one character observes, “If two politicians were making proposals, one to build long-ships [warships] and the other to spend the same on state pay [for citizens], the pay man would walk all over the trireme man.”

The problem of inadequate funding of the military––not just in Europe, but in our country as well––is explained by this enduring fact of human nature. The issue is not just money, then, but what priorities it’s spent on. Most of the Nato nations by global standards are rich. It would take just a dozen Nato nations’ combined GDPs––not counting that of the U.S., the biggest in the world––to equal China’s, the second largest.

But European nations’ militaries are hostage to political ideologies and regularly scheduled elections, and have diverse beliefs about the military and its importance. For example, as Asia Times columnist David Goldman recently pointed out on X,  “The Baltic States have a combined population of 6.2 million, and active duty military of less than 80,000 and twice that in reserves. Finland has a population of 5.1 million and a wartime military of 280,000 with 900,000 in reserve.” Funding or not funding the military is a political choice, one made easier for the Nato nations who have the U.S. to defend them.

Finally, the notion that a most likely invented, Maga-crowd-pleasing trolling would green-light more aggression from Russia is preposterous. Who believes that if Putin invaded the Baltic states, Nato nations would commit troops to fight and die for them? Wouldn’t they do just what they’re doing with Ukraine: send some materiel and money, the limit of what they “deem necessary”?

Words do count, but Trump’s record of hyperbole has long been factored into our rivals’ analyses and risk assessments. More important are the actions that follow the words.

For example, in March of 2012,  Barack Obama, not knowing the mic was still hot, leaned over and sotto voce asked Russian president Dmitri Medvedev to tell Putin, “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility” concerning missile defense systems proposed for Romania, Poland, Turkey and Spain, which Putin opposed. But it’s worse than that: In 2009, Obama canceled anti-missile sites in Poland and the Czech Republic after Putin’s complaints, no doubt part of Obama’s infamous “reset” of relations with Russia.

And as the final cherry on Obama’s appeasement sundae, Michel Barone reported, “The decision [to cancel the anti-missile site in Poland et al.] was relayed by telephone, at midnight European time, on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s attack on Poland pursuant to the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939. The Polish prime minister refused to take the call.”

Nothing Trump has ever said or done in regard to Russia equals this cringing accommodation of Vladimir Putin, or the nuclear deal with Iran, or Biden’s bloody skedaddle from Afghanistan, or his current browbeating of Israel to stop its destruction of Hamas and return to the status quo ante, which means incessant missile and rocket attacks and terrorist murders of Israeli civilians.

Article Five, like “our democracy” or “equity” or “green energy,” is a political token of the antinationalist global plutocracy that puts the interests of the “global community” ahead of the voters’. We are living in a time when such verbal sacred cows are becoming more and more dangerous, as the current conflicts in Ukraine and Israel––and the incoherence, politicization, and serial failures of our foreign policies–– demonstrate.

We must return to the tragic realism that until Vietnam, guided this country’s defense of its freedom and exceptionalism.