There's only been one president in recent times to complain openly about NATO and America's participation in it. Why start a conflict when that one president might give you exactly what you want without a single shot fired.

I'm not a Trump fan at all, but one of his major complaints was that Europe isn't allocating enough money to defence. Which is quite a reasonable thing to demand.

Primary responsibility to defend Europe should lie with Europe. The ability to defend oneself is just as important as climate. One has wide public support, the other is taken for granted (thanks to Nato).

A lot of this is tied to non proliferation. We'll carry the buck if you don't aquire nukes. So it's not as simple as who pays how much.

NATO members have always been supposed to spend at least 2% of GDP on military, other than the US and I think the UK literally no one was.

France does. Not surprising though, maintaining nukes and nuclear missile submarines ain't cheap.

I believe that was a goal for a future date that has not yet arrived. Trump complained about it, but it wasn't due yet and was going to happen anyway. So it can look like he made it happen. He's full of cons.

The 2% commitment was originally agreed to in 2006. After member nations continued to fail to spend enough, in 2014 it was a set as a goal to increase towards that goal year over year until 2024:

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_67655.htm#:~:text=....

Several countries hadn't made real any moves towards reaching that goal, and even now are still falling far short (see page 3):

https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2020/10/p...

The reason why the EU can afford social programs is because the USA and NATO provide them with military defense so it doesn't come out of their military budgets. After Ukraine gets invaded they might want to build up their military again.

Welcome to World War 3. watch the FOSSIL fuel prices, ouch!

They were engaged in conflict during that period in eastern Ukraine, just not with identifiable russian troops.

Trump forced the hand of unwilling NATO countries to spend their 2% for their defense budget. How is this against the alliance? I would say it's the opposite.

Peace is better than war.

The war is over Ukrainian NATO membership. If NATO membership was off the table, or if Biden was strong and had the conviction to defend Ukraine there would be no war.

Instead he entertained Ukrainian NATO membership and tried to fend Putin off with finger wagging.

I don't think its at all reasonable to suppose that the US simply saying they would oppose Ukraine joining NATO would have in any universe enough to avert war when merely preventing the expansion of NATO can seemingly be obtained far easier with their influence on NATO members who must be unanimous to induct a new member.

That is to say they have every reason to believe that they could without invasion keep Ukraine out of NATO for the foreseeable future so the invasion isn't about that issue.

> I don't think its at all reasonable to suppose that the US simply saying they would oppose Ukraine joining NATO would have in any universe enough to avert war

No, of course not. What NATO should have done was to accept Ukraine as a member. Anybody think Putin would invade a country that can refer to §5?

Right, just "separatists" who happened to start fighting to expand Putin's empire and give him the region that supplies Russia's military with raw materials. From 2014,

> Nevertheless, following its actions in Crimea, there is justified concern that Russia could now aim to annex eastern Ukraine. Unlike on the Crimean peninsula, there is not a large majority here who feel like they belong to Russia - and only about a quarter of the population of the east overall are ethnic Russians.

https://www.dw.com/en/the-significance-of-the-donbas/a-17567...

Trump did not want to stand up to Putin, so the early work to annex eastern Ukraine didn't make the news very often. Trump had no response to it.

Elections have consequences.