NATO Spending and Global Alliances

Well, first of all, our European allies are doing more.

And, and I think everybody needs to get updated

on the spending that's

happening. GDP per capita, we're like a middle-of-the-road

NATO ally right now. This notion that we're doing more and they're not,

that's a,

that's a myth from, from the Trump era is gone.

And I just was in three NATO countries two weeks ago.

All of them are outperforming us, and they're not doing it because

Trump is persuading them. It's another...

You can tell I get animated about this.

They're doing it because Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, and they, they're

doing this out of self-interest, and they're ... That, that p- that....

They're okay. We're the ones not sharing the burden.

They're giving-- They just announced, you know, $90 billion at the NATO Summit

for Ukraine. You know what our c- our contribution is? Like z- near zero.

What about burden sharing? Why aren't we sharing that burden,

Americans?

We should be in this fight too because it's in our mutual security.

And then number two, I think we got to get back to

treating our allies at least as

respectfully as President Tre- Trump treats Xi

Jinping and Putin. Just look at what he says about Putin

and Xi, and

then contrast it to what he says about our democratic allies.

At, at a minimum, we should do that.

And then, you know, to state the obvious, we shouldn't

threaten to invade our allies, right?

We have a theory in the political science democracies don't fight wars with

each other. It's a pretty robust theory.

And now Trump's talking about we need to take Fin- uh, Denmark.

He's just such an idiotic thing. Look at the map,

everybody. Denmark, Greenland is part of

the NATO alliance. We need to build alive.

We need to build more places there, defense, minerals.

We can do it as part of an alliance. Same with our Canadian friends.

This joke about the 51st state, that is not a way to,

to create coherence. That's the bad news.

The good news, because I interact with these countries

fairly

frequently, I think there's a real thirst for getting

back to

just more pragmatic

ways of doing business in the free world.

And I think with a different leader, Republican or Democrat, I'm

agnostic about that. But some of these more, I would say, just

crazy ideas that are not in America's interest, we

gotta, we gotta rethink our place in the world.

But I'm confident we can because our ideas are better.

As I said before, Churchill was right.

Democracy is a horrible system of government, except for all the others

tried. And I think most people in the world agree

with Churchill