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Karoline Leavitt: “They were tested and they failed.”
Here’s the thing about NATO that apparently needs explaining to the most powerful government on earth: it is not a taxi.
You do not ring NATO. You do not place an order. You do not specify delivery within 72 hours and then stand in the Rose Garden bewildered that nothing has turned up. NATO is a collective defence alliance built on the radical concept that its members are, in fact, members, with votes and opinions and sovereign militaries they get to deploy according to their own national interests. This is written down. It has been written down since 1949. The documents are available in English.
Nobody in this administration has read them.
Let’s go back to Greenland for a moment, because this is apparently where the rot set in. Trump wanted Greenland. Just wanted it. Asked if he could have it. Was told no, it belongs to Denmark, which is a NATO ally, which means the whole thing was always going to be diplomatically awkward at best and catastrophically self-defeating at worst. His response was not to reflect on this. His response was to decide that NATO was a large problem. An alliance of thirty-two nations that has kept the peace in Europe for seventy-five years was, in his assessment, getting in the way of his property acquisition.
This tells you everything you need to know about how the man thinks. And it tells you everything about who he hired to think alongside him.
Every serious leader in history, every CEO worth the title, every general who ever won anything, has operated on the same basic principle: hire people smarter than yourself. Steve Jobs did it. Churchill did it. Every remotely competent executive who ever ran anything of consequence understood that your job is not to be the cleverest person in the building. Your job is to find the cleverest people in the building and then get out of their way. Surround yourself with people who will tell you when you’re wrong. Who know things you don’t. Who have read the documents.Trump inverted this entirely.
A cabinet selected not for expertise but for loyalty. Not for knowledge but for the willingness to perform agreement. Pete Hegseth at Defence. A communications team that announces things with confidence at a ratio entirely disconnected from understanding. An administration where the qualification for the job was, essentially, never making the man at the top feel inadequate.
The outcome of this philosophy is Karoline Leavitt at a podium reading four words as though she had just solved something. Delivered with the serene confidence of someone who has never had to sit in a room and actually work out what NATO is, how it functions, why it was built, or what the word collective means in the context of collective defence.
They were tested and they failed.
Europe is not shaking its fist. Europe is shaking its head. Slowly. Wearily. In the way you do when you’ve explained something seventeen times and the person across the table still hasn’t got it and you’ve finally accepted that they never will.
The allies are building their own defence architecture now, with people in the room who have read the documents. They stopped waiting for Washington to grow into the role some time ago.
And somewhere in all of this, Greenland is still Danish. Still will be tomorrow. NATO is still an alliance of sovereign nations who get to say no. Still will be next week. And the White House is still staffed by people who find both of these facts baffling.
Some things don’t change just because you haven’t understood them.
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Derrick Evans@DerrickEvans4WV
🚨Karoline Leavitt: "I have a direct quote from the President on NATO!" “They were tested, and they failed.”
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