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Victor Davis Hanson: NATO Has Become a One-Way Street

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

This is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.  

Our on-and-off relationship with our European allies and friends is in another low spot. There’s a lot of developments that have been going on that I don’t think they quite appreciate have created a loss of confidence in the United States about the reliability of our NATO allies. 

And this transcends the earlier existential problem that all of our NATO allies, 32, had over 20 years promised but reified that and ratified it the last 15 years, they would spend 2% of GDP on defense. And as you remember, in 2016, after the election, and Donald Trump, remarked as he was going to enter office in 2017 that all but six of them had not met their requirements. 

And after all this bullying, all this acrimony, now almost all of them, I think with one exception, have made the 2%. But now we’re into another series of crises.  

The former head of German intelligence was just found out in his retirement, I think he’s 80, that he was a traitor, and that he had been selling or trafficking in secrets that involved German and NATO security to existential enemies like China and maybe Russia. 

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That creates a lack of confidence in the security that we have with the Germans.

And Britain, remember, we have a dual-use base, an RAF and a U.S. Air Force base in the United Kingdom, and the idea, of course, is forward deployment. So if we would get into a crisis with China, with Russia, over Ukraine, almost anywhere in the world, we would have maybe 11 of our $320 million B-1 bombers that have capability to carry nuclear weapons and huge payloads, but they would be based and safe in this air base that was patrolled by our allies, the British. 

Now we learn that some terrorists had a dry run where they got very close to this base and were in the process of filming it and doing reconnaissance work.  

And we learned two things from the British government, Prime Minister [Andy] Burnham. Number one, they were trained by or in the service to Iran, the greatest terrorist threat in the world. 

And number two, they were........

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