From RT
When US President Donald Trump dismisses the NATO alliance as "obsolete" what he really means is not withdrawing from the military pact, but rather offloading running costs onto European nations.
Several times during his election campaign, Trump sounded contemptuous about the 28-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization. His comments about it being "obsolete" raised hopes in certain quarters that the 45th president would scale back American military participation in NATO as part of a wider move to reduce US belligerence.
When Trump gave his inauguration speech on January 20, the thrust of his "America First" theme appeared to be a new focus on building US society and infrastructure, as opposed to squandering resources by intervening militarily around the world as under previous administrations.
Trump's oft-stated desire to restore friendly relations with Russia also seemed in keeping with his apparently jaundiced view of NATO. The eastward expansion of the military alliance since the 1990s has been a continual provocation to Moscow. When Trump called the pact "obsolete," that suggested willingness for a new US-Russia detente.
Unfortunately, expectations of a more peaceful, less militaristic US administration are rapidly crumbling.
Only days ago, President Trump delivered a barnstorming jingoistic speech to the Conservative Political Action Committee in Washington DC in which he declared he would oversee the "biggest military build-up in American history."
"No-one is ever going to mess with us," announced Trump to chest-thumping cheers from the audience of "USA! USA!"
Last week, Trump also gave notice he was prepared to launch a new global nuclear arms race. In an interview with the Reuters news agency, he vowed the US must always be "top of the pack" in having nuclear supremacy.
"We're never going to fall behind any country even if it is a friendly country. We're never going to fall behind on nuclear power," said the president.
This follows Trump's reported comments to Russian President Vladimir Putin in a phone call earlier this month when he repudiated the New START nuclear reduction treaty as a "bad deal" for the US, suggesting he would unilaterally walk away from obligations.
Such a move is reminiscent of former US President George W Bush unilaterally withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty in 2002, which has had ongoing destabilizing repercussions for US-Russian relations.
What we are seeing is a lot Trump rhetoric about "making America great again" and not "imposing our way of life on others" being flatly contradicted by ongoing, hard-boiled practice of American militarism as an essential cornerstone of US policy.
The reality is that the US economy is not the claimed rosy paradigm of "free market capitalism." It is much more a centrally planned, government-subsidized military economy -- a form of corporate welfare, rather than private enterprise. And it has been this way since at least the Second World War.
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