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Foreign.
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2026 in Ankara, Turkey, for a two day summit of the countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO. President Donald J. Trump told reporters he was very disappointed with NATO because it had not backed his war on Iran. We weren't treated well because we did something in Iran, he said. We don't need anybody's help. I didn't even want their help. They said they wouldn't be there. And we've invested trillions of dollars in NATO. Why? To protect European countries and others, Canada, et cetera, but to protect people countries from generally speaking, it used to be the Soviet Union, now it's Russia. And I say that's fine, but you would think that they'd be very willing to do something to help us, and they really weren't. Trump went on to claim his beef with NATO began over Greenland, which he wants because Greenland doesn't help Denmark, but it's an important part for the United States and it's surrounded by China ships and Russian ships and that's not going to happen. The ships is. It's not going to happen. It was Greenland that in my. And it continues to be that it should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark. And when they wouldn't go along with it and with all the money we spend to help them with Russia and we don't have to spend any money, we could remove all of our soldiers out of Europe because as you probably noticed, Europe's a very different place than it was 20 years ago. A lot different. Much different. It's a much different. And they better be careful with immigration and energy. If they're not careful with those two things, you're not going to have a Europe anymore. Okay, thank you very much, everybody. NATO is the most effective alliance in human history. It is also a defensive, not an offensive alliance. Representatives from the United States and 11 other nations in North America and Europe came together to sign the original NATO declaration on April 4, 1949. The alliance guaranteed collective security because all of the member nations agreed to defend each other other against an attack by a third party. At the time, their main concern was resisting Soviet aggression. But as Trump noted, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russian President Vladimir Putin, NATO resisted Russian aggression. Instead, the alliance is effective because it calls for collective defense. Article 5 of the treaty requires every nation to come to the aid of any one of them if it is attacked militarily. That article has been invoked only once in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, after which NATO led troops went to Afghanistan. On the day NATO went into effect, President Harry S. Truman said, if there is anything inevitable in the future, it is the will of the people of the world for freedom and for peace. In the years since 1949, his observation seems to have proven correct. NATO now has 32 member nations. Crucially, NATO acts not only as a response to attack but also as a deterrent, and its strength has always been backstopped by the military strength of the U.S. including its nuclear weapons. Trump has repeatedly attacked NATO and said he would take the US out of it in a second term, alarming Congress enough that in 2023 it put into the National Defense Authorization Act a measure prohibiting any president from leaving NATO without the approval of two thirds of the Senate or a congressional law. But as foreign policy specialist Anne Applebaum noted in the Atlantic in 2024, even though Trump might have trouble actually tossing out a longstanding treaty that has safeguarded national security for 75 years, the realization that the US is abandoning its commitment to collective defense would make the treaty itself worthless. In place of the powerful NATO alliance that has protected all nations sovereignty, Trump appears to want the sort of world called for by Russia's President Vladimir Putin, in which great powers carve up the globe into spheres of influence. In January, Robert Kagan warned that Trump's destruction of the order that has underpinned global security for the past 80 years was creating the most dangerous world since World War II. With the end of open access to global resources, markets and strategic bases, and without reliable friends or allies, the US Will need more military spending than ever. Americans are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future, kagan warned. They are accustomed to the basically peaceful, prosperous and open world and have come to think it is the normal state of international affairs likely to continue indefinitely. They can't imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them. Everything will be up for grabs, Kagan wrote, with myriad flashpoints for potential conflict. If Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive, Kagan wrote, wait until they start paying for what comes next. Kagan published his article just two weeks after Trump had sent troops to Venezuela to seize the nation's president and his wife and take control of the country's oil fields. Since then, as Simon Romero of the New York Times reported yesterday, the Trump administration has taken an estimated $8 billion in oil revenue out of the country, although it has refused to say how it is using the funds. In the wake of the devastating earthquakes that hit Venezuela on June 24, Romero reports that the US has so far pledged only $300 million in aid. US officials destroyed the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, through which it would have distributed aid passed, so the assistance is being funneled through the Red Cross, the United nations and religious organizations. The top U.S. diplomat in Venezuela, John Barrett, told Romero the U.S. will continue to prioritize using Venezuela's oil resources to rebuild the nation's economy. Less than six weeks after the Atlantic published Kagan's article, Trump attacked Iran in strikes he appeared to think would mirror the strikes against Venezuela, enabling him to replace Iran's leadership with men willing to work with the US and perhaps enabling the US to take a stake in Iran's oil production. Instead, Iran seized control of the Strait of Hormuz in the aftermath of the strikes, choking off about 27% of the world's globally traded oil and about a third of the world's seaborne fertilizer. Rather than a quick strike, Trump's war in Iran is now stretching into its final fifth month, and attempts to end it, even on terms worse than when it began, are faltering. Tonight at 5:15, as NATO leaders met in Turkey, U.S. central Command announced that U.S. forces had launched a series of powerful strikes against Iran to impose heavy costs for targeting and attacking commercial shipping crewed by innocent civilians in an international waterway. It said the strikes were a response to Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels that were transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Iran's demonstrated aggression was unwarranted, dangerous and a clear violation of the ceasefire. It later said it had hit more than 80 targets.
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Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, MA. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.