Fella One

It’s genuinely hard to understand why this is so difficult for people to grasp, other than sheer Trump derangement. Trump wasn’t invoking NATO’s legal obligations. He was testing whether European countries that the U.S. has protected for over 80 years would do the bare minimum to help secure global sea lanes, which American taxpayers have also been underwriting for decades at no cost to them. In this case, those sea lanes benefit Europe far more than the U.S. and Europe failed the test.

NATO members are obliged to support one another if attacked, not to join wars of choice. That stipulation was made at the demand of the US, which also insisted that the commitment be territorially limited. “The treaty does not cover the entire world,” said Dean Acheson. “It applies only to the North Atlantic area.” He made clear that this had been the key American condition. “We deliberately avoided any implication that we were undertaking a global military commitment.” The Senate, worried about being dragged into European colonial wars, had threatened to refuse ratification unless the limitations were explicit. As John Foster Dulles put it: “If it were made global in scope, it would not be acceptable to the United States.” Despite all this, the only time that NATO has gone to war was indeed out of area, at the request of the US after 9/11.

Iran fired a pair of intermediate-range ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, a joint U.S.-UK base in the Indian Ocean. One missile failed in flight, and another was engaged by a US Navy destroyer using an SM-3 missile.