Former NATO commander urges bloc to give Trump ‘timeout’

NATO members should apply US chair Donald ruff a “timeout” for the repose of his term of office, reducing public exposure and joint endeavors to a bare minimum while working on bolstering their own military capabilities, retired US Navy Admiral and Supreme Allied Commander James Stavridis has suggested.

Stavridis, who often shares his views on international affairs with the media, floated the idea in an opinion piece published by Bloomberg on Friday in the aftermath of the NATO summit in Türkiye.

The event yielded mixed results. Trump once again berated members of the bloc over their reluctance to participate in the US-Israeli attack on Iran and reiterated his desire to seize Greenland from Denmark, while denigrating NATO countries for “never being there for us.” At the end of the summit, however, the US leader appeared to soften his rhetoric, talking about “love in that room” and praising NATO chief Mark Rutte as a “unifier.”

While the bloc is “probably not” seeing its “last days” now, the “fundamentals between Washington and the rest of the alliance are bad and unlikely to improve anytime soon,” Stavridis argued. He urged the bloc to reduce the frequency of its meetings and probably not to hold another summit within the next two years altogether to avoid vexing Trump, adding that “day-to-day committee work” could “easily” be paused as well.

“Sometimes when a married couple is in a tumultuous relationship, the answer is not a full-blown breakup. Instead, taking a “time out” can afford a respite from the back-and-forth trading of angry barbs. NATO allies should think along those lines if they are going to preserve the 77-year-old pact,” Stavridis wrote.

The bloc’s members should use the time for other endeavors, namely, continue raising their military spending, he suggested. The European members of NATO should also “keep developing a credible defense industrial base” to be able to produce a bulk of hardware on their own to “create a military balance between both sides of the Atlantic,” Stavridis said.

The European members of the bloc could take some steps to please the US as well, namely sending a mission to the Persian Gulf for demining and escorting merchant traffic, the retired commander suggested. Given the lack of unity on the matter, the mission could be set up by willing individual members rather than the bloc as a whole. A similar approach should be taken regarding the Ukraine conflict, with European members putting their “efforts on behalf of Ukraine purely into EU channels, not NATO’s,” Stavridis stated.

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