Trump Wasn’t the First

Since NATO’s creation, the European nations have, in the main, been shirking their obligations to the alliance and with that betraying their fellow alliance members. Then-President Jack Kennedy (D) was among the first American government officials to grow tired of that shirking and to object to it out loud.

John F Kennedy in 1963 told his National Security Council that “we cannot continue to pay for the military protection of Europe while the NATO states are not paying their fair share.”

Then it was then-Deputy Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci in 1981 in front of the Munich Security Conference:

[T]he United States cannot be expected to improve and strengthen US forces in Europe, unless other allies increase their own contribution to the combined defense effort.

With the end of the Cold War almost 35 years ago,

NATO asserts that almost half its members won’t spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense this year, a decade after the alliance affirmed that baseline expectation.

But those were just a bunch of polite noises.

Nor is Trump the only one objecting to European NATO members’ sloth and perfidy today, although today’s Progressive-Democratic Party politicians are standing silently on the sidelines in a reversal (repudiation?) of their Democrat predecessors.

[I]ncreasingly prominent voices in the US think “the time has come for Europe to stand on its own feet,” as Senator JD Vance (R, OH) put it recently.

Trump still is right, and it’s been his sharp rhetoric as opposed to those 50 years of “pretty please” that has gotten more NATO members—but not all of them, shamefully—to start honoring their fiscal and equipment commitments to NATO.

US Is Even More Vulnerable

The mostly unfettered inflow of “refugees” from—pick a source, but mostly the Middle East—into Europe is beginning to awaken Europe’s western and central nations to the terrorist risk they face from that flow (eastern Europe’s nations have long been well aware). That relatively uninhibited flow, with its sample that have been caught, should be clanging alarm bells for us, too.

Authorities in Europe say they have foiled several terror plots, some involving suspects posing as refugees, raising alarm about a growing array of threats from extremists.

Threats from terrorists, I’ll say, since The Wall Street Journal‘s news personalities are too timid to call the spade a spade. Examples of those terrorists’ plots—those that have been discovered—abound.

German and Dutch investigators…arrested four people for allegedly receiving the order from Hamas to open a secret cache of weapons and attack Jewish targets in Berlin and elsewhere in Western Europe.
German prosecutors said Hamas had buried the weapons underground in Europe years ago but that the suspects, all longstanding Hamas members involved in the group’s overseas operations, wouldn’t reveal where.
Investigators found pictures of Jewish and Israeli targets in Europe on some of the suspects’ mobile phones….

And

…arrest late last year of a group of Tajik nationals suspected of planning attacks on the Cologne Cathedral in Germany and St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna around Christmas. Both churches fill with hundreds of visitors for the holiday season.

And

Italian authorities said they had detained three Palestinians suspected of being members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, designated as a terror group by the US and the European Union. The three were preparing to attack civilian and military targets in Europe, the Italian National Police said.

And on and on. That bit about pre-caching weapons for later retrieval and use is especially troubling, or should be, for us in the US and for our government. Europe doesn’t seem to be getting the large inflow of PRC military-age single men that we are, although Russia’s penchant for exporting little green men for sabotage and battlespace shaping is well enough known, as is the difficulty of detecting them before they go operational. Among those PRC young men flowing so freely into our nation could well be PLA special forces operators; an outcome of the PLA’s broad and rapid buildup, including its special operations units.

Nor can we in our nation say how many Iranian/Iranian-backed terrorists have come in over our borders, unchecked, unhindered in any way, perhaps at a time of their choosing to link up with the weapons other illegal aliens have secreted for them.

This is the risk—in spades—that Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is creating for us with his deliberately opened borders policy and the associated wholly unfettered flood of illegal aliens. It’s the risk from the upwards of 1.5 million illegal aliens coming in every year whose entry would be codified in the shameful Border Insecurity bill which the Senate enacted.