Former President Donald Trump views the NATO alliance, one of America's most critical military partnerships in promoting global security, through a lens of personal profit, warned Puck News' Julia Ioffe on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Thursday.
This comes amid her reporting that foreign NATO leaders are privately bracing for the possibility Trump could defeat President Joe Biden this November, and they are debating how to curb the worst of his instincts, given that when he was in office he routinely demanded other NATO members pay more on military spending, threatened to leave the alliance, and had a closeness with Russia's Vladimir Putin that could threaten U.S. support for Ukraine against Russia's invasion.
"We were talking about reports coming out that Trump would pull back even on intelligence sharing with NATO allies, which is mind stifling, right?" said Ioffe.
"He completely doesn't understand what alliances are for, if there's not money being exchanged or he's not somehow personally benefitting from it," she added.
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Ioffe is referring to new reporting from Politico that indicates Trump is toying with the idea of scaling back critical intelligence that European nations use to protect themselves against security threats from Russia.
Last month, other reports indicated that NATO leaders were exploring new coordination schemes for military transfers to Ukraine that would ensure the transfers continue even if Trump is elected and scales back support from the United States.
For his part, Biden has sought to project America's enduring commitment to NATO at this week's summit, giving a fiery speech that NATO countries were meeting the military spending commitments Trump had long demanded of them and saying, "My friends, it's good we're stronger than ever, because this moment in history calls for our collective strength. Autocrats will overturn the world order, which is, by and large, kept for nearly 80 years and counting."
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