(DCNF)—Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson warned Monday that the United States cannot continue to carry the weight of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alone.
President Donald Trump escalated his rhetoric toward NATO, calling the alliance a “paper tiger” and suggesting the U.S. might no longer need to defend NATO allies. Appearing on “The Ingraham Angle,” Hanson said the United States must seriously reconsider its approach to NATO, warning that the alliance’s current structure and European weaknesses demand a new strategy.
“I think we’re going to have to redefine or either redefine our relationship with NATO or start looking at individual NATO allies and bilateral relations. And I think it’s reflective of deeper, much deeper problems, whether it’s their open borders, their large, unassimilated Islamic populations, their coercion of free speech, their infertility and demography that’s about 1.3 replacement,” Hanson said. “They don’t have fossil fuels. They don’t believe in it. And they have created this self-imposed, I guess you would call it a suicidal weakness.”
Hanson recounted a series of U.S. military involvements around the globe, including the Falklands, Chad, Kosovo, Libya, and Ukraine. In each case, he said, the U.S. shouldered logistical, operational, or strategic burdens while European partners avoided direct responsibility.
“I think we need to clarify what NATO is basically saying. In the case of Spain, particularly in France and Turkey, they were almost siding with Iran. But the other countries that didn’t let us, like the U.K. and Italy, as well as those three, they were saying, ‘Well, this wasn’t our war,’ but they don’t realize that we got involved in a lot of their unilateral events. Falklands was not our war,” Hanson said. “We helped the British. They would not have been able to retake the Falklands without U.S. logistical and resupply. Chad wasn’t our war. The French wanted to go in there to their post-colonial interest and get out the Islamists. That wasn’t our war. Serbia and Kosovo. Kosovo was not a NATO member. It was attacked by Serbia. They told us it was on the doorstep of Europe.”
Hanson said the United States has repeatedly carried the burden of global conflicts while NATO allies hesitated or stepped aside.
“You had to come in and lead the coalition of NATO power. We did. Then they told us that we have to bomb Gaddafi and restore the momentum of the Arab Spring. That wasn’t our war. We came in there. That was a seven-month misadventure. And then they said Ukraine is your war, and we could see that we had interest in stopping Putin, but Ukraine was not a NATO,” Hanson added. “So they engineer a lot of these interventions, and they do it both under the guise of NATO and singularly and unilaterally, like France and the U.K. But then they’re telling us it’s not your war, even though we know now that these missiles had a 2,500-mile range, and they had enough uranium, apparently, for 11 bombs. And they were an immediate and dire threat that we removed for them, and they can’t even repay that reciprocity.”
During the 1982 Falklands War, the United States provided missiles, aviation fuel, satellite communications, and logistical support to Britain after Argentina rejected peace efforts. Reagan administration officials also confirmed that Washington supplied the U.K. with advanced Sidewinder air‑to‑air missiles and sonar buoys to bolster British combat capabilities during the campaign.
After NATO’s air campaign against Yugoslav forces in 1999, the NATO‑led Kosovo Force — which included U.S. and allied troops — deployed to Kosovo to maintain security, ensure public safety, and support peace‑building efforts in the region. The ongoing Kosovo Force mission continues to operate under NATO command with forces from multiple allies to help stabilize Kosovo following the humanitarian crisis and conflict in the late 1990s.
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