Democratic Party representatives are calling out Donald Trump and his administration for their flippant style of dealing with the war in Iran.
Trump's admin approved strikes on the Middle Eastern country as part of a joint operation with Israel on February 28. Since then, the president has threatened further strikes and carried out such actions, but he and his cabinet have offered a multitude of different excuses for waging the war.
These excuses have come to a head in Congress, with Sens. Christopher Coons (D-DE) and Tim Kaine (D-VA) calling out Trump for the rhetoric around the war. Coons, speaking with Raw Story Friday, blasted Trump for distancing the US from NATO — especially given the last time the world organization acted on an Article 5 order.
Article 5 states that if a NATO Ally sustains an armed attack, every other member of the Alliance will consider this as an armed attack against all members, and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the attacked Ally.
Coons ridiculed Trump for claiming, "NATO has never stood with us and that we can't count on them."
"Trump repeated the obscenity yesterday," he said, before explaining how the intergovernmental organization had sprung to action in favor of the US. He said, "The only time NATO has actually invoked Article 5 and deployed to war was in defense of us in Afghanistan. A third of the combat deaths [in Afghanistan] were NATO troops.
"I led a bipartisan delegation to Denmark during the same week Trump gave that speech about how NATO had never stood by us, and Senator Tillis and I laid a memorial wreath at the site that remembers the 52 names of those who died in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"But the president keeps disrespecting our NATO allies this way, which leads to the unsurprising result that when he didn't consult them before launching a war of choice with Iran, they didn't feel willing to but in to open the Strait of Hormuz."
Kaine added, "The problem with his argument is, he's been non-stop screwing around with NATO allies during his whole time in office. Imposing tariffs on them, threatening to invade a NATO ally, and you know, it is unilateral relations 101 that after you've kicked people around when you suddenly ask people to help when you've kicked them around, they're not going to be that interested.
"So he should stop kicking them around, and then he might get more cooperation. If the president were full-throated in his support of Ukraine, that might be a more parallel argument, but the Europeans are looking and going, 'Well, wait a minute'. Biden was really supportive of Ukraine. What have you done about it? It's not an argument where the president is really standing on solid ground."