Former NATO Spokesperson Says Europe May Need To Spend 5% Of GDP On Defense

A former NATO spokesperson has said members of the 32-nation bloc may need to spend 4 or 5 percent of their GDP on defense in the coming years, especially if the United States pulls back on its commitments under President-elect Donald Trump.

The Epoch Times’ Chris Summers reports that Oana Lungescu, who worked at NATO between 2010 and 2024, told a Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) briefing in London on Thursday, that a majority of America’s allies in NATO were spending at least 2 percent of GDP on defense.

But she said, “Obviously, we’re in a better place than we used to be, but is 2 percent enough? Does anybody here think that 2 percent is enough?”

She was speaking as the Ukrainian military claimed Russian forces struck the Ukrainian city of Dnipro with an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on Nov. 21.

The alleged ICBM strike happened just days after reports emerged the United States had allowed Ukraine to use U.S.-origin long-range weapons for deep strikes inside Russian territory; a request Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has made for months.

Russia says Ukraine used the Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) against Russia’s Bryansk region on Nov. 19.

Amid the apparent escalation of the Ukrainian conflict, Lungescu, said: “I would think that there will be a big push towards 3 percent and frankly, we should not need Donald Trump to tell us that we need [to spend] 3 percent.

“Frankly, if there is any change or moderation of the US commitment to Europe … we will need 4 percent and 5 percent of GDP on defense.”

Lungescu said: “Interestingly, there’s a new poll in Germany just the other day showing that 50 percent of those asked said that 3 to 3.5 percent is about right, which is a huge, huge mindset change for Germany.”

In February, Trump told journalists in New York that “NATO countries have to pay up.”

“The United States is in for $2oo billion and they’re in for $25 billion,” he said. “They’re not paying what they should, and they laugh at the stupidity of the United States of America.”

Thursday’s briefing, hosted by the British defense think tank RUSI, was headlined “The impact of the U.S. presidential election on European security.”

Jim Townsend, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO policy under President Barack Obama, said the world situation was very different from when Trump left office in 2020, partly because of the growing relationship between Russia and China.

Putin Expressing ‘Displeasure’

He said, “There’s a lot of things that Putin is doing right now to express his displeasure over ATACMS sure, but also to message to the incoming administration, ‘don’t think that we’re close friends with you guys and you’re going to roll over us, Trump.’”

Townsend said Russia was angry with the United States and he described the Kremlin’s reaction as: “We’re not happy with the West. We’re not happy with what you’re doing, and you’re going to see our fists about this.”

Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), described the relationship between Trump and Putin as a “bromance.”

He predicted Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) would be Trump’s choice for secretary of state, and he pointed out Rubio had voted against President Joe Biden’s $95 billion funding package for Ukraine in February.

Bergmann said the nominations Trump has so far made for his Cabinet suggested that in his second term, “the dial is turned up.”

“It is time to … take Trump very seriously about what he has indicated that he wants to do,” he said.

He added there had been lots of discussions about China’s leader Xi Jinping’s intentions with Taiwan, and “there was a common refrain, ‘You should read what he says and take them literally.’ And I think that’s true with Trump.”

Bergmann said the president-elect wants to fundamentally change U.S. policy on European security, on Ukraine, and Russia.

“I think when it comes to NATO that means basically a major paradigm shift.”

NATO spokesperson Oana Lungescu (L) and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg arrive for the NATO summit at the Ifema congress centre in Madrid on June 29, 2022. Javier Soriano/AFP via Getty Images

Lungescu, a Romanian former journalist, predicted: “The next four years will be turbulent, will be complicated, and there may be many things that we don’t like.

“But ultimately, if you look at the growing alignment between Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, these authoritarian states, which are all adversaries to what the U.S. stands for, and to what Europeans stand for.

“It’s in our interests to stay calm, to plan, and to invest in what unites us, rather than in what divides us,” she added.

Rutte Is ‘Friend of Trump’

Lungescu said the new NATO secretary general, former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, had a “good working relationship with Donald Trump” and described himself as a friend of Trump.

She said, “So I would expect Mark Rutte to try to go to Washington as quickly as possible to meet not just the new administration, but also the new Congress.”

She said bipartisan support for NATO will be part of the calculus in terms of how the administration proceeds.

“He will need to make the case … of why NATO is a good deal for the United States,” added Lungescu, who is now a senior fellow at RUSI.

Lungescu said she thought the NATO summit in The Hague in June would be shorter than originally planned.

She said Trump’s nomination of Matt Whitaker as the next U.S. permanent representative to NATO was “interesting” and “could be a positive sign.”

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Originally Posted at; https://www.zerohedge.com//

zerohedge
Economics , News , Politics , Science
December 7, 2024
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The Miserable Cost Of An Open Border

Authored by Seth Barron via RealClearPolitics,

The Biden-Harris experiment in dissolving the U.S. border has wrought massive changes to American society, most of which will not be understood for years, if not decades. Since 2021, U.S. border officials have had at least 10 million “encounters” with migrants, many of whom were allowed to enter the country. There is no telling how many more aliens entered the country without encountering enforcement agents. The population of the United States may have increased by as much as 15 million people in just a few years.

This massive flow of humanity crosses multiple national borders, involves every mode of transportation, accounts for billions of dollars paid in fees to smugglers, and describes a fantastically complex economy of suffering and hope. In an effort to get a handle on this human tide, noted muckraker James O’Keefe – known for his hidden camera “gotcha” interviews with abortionists, media executives, progressive nonprofit executives, and other degenerate types – traces the migrant onrush from its source, and seeks to trace the machinery of profit and influence that is conducting it from great removes.

“Line In The Sand,” the resulting documentary, is a remarkable and humane exposition, revealing perspectives and images American audiences have mostly been prevented from seeing. O’Keefe and his intrepid team begin on the U.S. side of the Mexican border, where we witness migrants crossing the border through holes that their guides have cut in a fence that serves as a target as much as a barrier. Infrared cameras show dozens of illegal aliens streaming toward “pick-up” vehicles on the U.S. side while smugglers – presumably cartel members – a few feet away taunt O’Keefe and his group. “What if I were to run up to them right now, what would happen?” O’Keefe asks his guide. “I would highly advise you against that,” he is told, in a classic understatement.

The fact that coyotes and other human traffickers are paid to assist northbound migrants with their passage is no scandal; we all know what their motivations are and why they are doing what they do. But O’Keefe documents multiple examples of U.S. Border Patrol agents standing idly by while illegal aliens cross, virtually under their noses. “Why aren’t you doing anything?” he asks. “Have a good day, guys,” a border agent desultorily responds before driving off in the general direction of the episode. Later, a migrant stands in front of a Border Patrol truck, clearly trying to alert the agents of his intention to surrender, but is studiously ignored until O’Keefe and his team call their attention to him.

There is a kind of sad comedy in the operations of U.S. border security, and O’Keefe is not unsympathetic to the absurd position that border agents have been put in. Trained to defend the national border and to serve as the first line of defense of American soil, these agents have been recommissioned as a perverse Welcome Wagon for illegal aliens, charged with making their undocumented and uninvited entrance to the United States as commodious as possible.

Looking to get deeper into the heart of this migratory avalanche, O’Keefe went deep into Mexico, to the city of Irapuato, about 150 miles northwest of Mexico City. Irapuato is a popular railway junction where thousands of migrants climb aboard “La Bestia,” or “The Beast,” a cargo train that chugs northward toward the United States. In the film’s most remarkable footage, O’Keefe and his team join with migrants, mostly from South and Central America, to ride The Beast, also known as “el Tren del Muerto,” or the Train of Death. O’Keefe talks to the migrants without condescension, asking them their destinations and what they plan to do when they get there, and their concerns about the perilous nature of the journey. We see the film crew race to jump on a moving train and clamber on top to sit in a pile of coal; O’Keefe is shocked at how truly dangerous this small element of the trip is and sympathizes with the migrants’ difficult choices. These scenes are among the film’s most affecting, along with the crew’s random encounter with a little girl who had just crossed the border after journeying from Guatemala by herself. There is a human dimension to illegal immigration, and O’Keefe does not ignore it.

However, there is also an impersonal dimension to this massive population transfer, and O’Keefe determinedly aims to uncover it – to put a face to the institutions and administrators that benefit from the rough injection of millions of people into American society. From government agents to bus companies to nonprofit resettlement groups to private contractors running huge, walled compounds housing thousands of children, O’Keefe doggedly tries to penetrate the mechanics of a system that resolutely hides itself behind a screen of silence, usually in the name of “safety” and “privacy.”

Some of the film’s more comical moments pertain to these segments, such as when the team follows some just-arrived Chinese migrants in San Diego to an employment agency, where other Chinese aliens, already in the country for several months, complain that it’s much harder to live in the United States than they had imagined. O’Keefe tries to sniff out a connection between the owner of the agency and more powerful actors, but it emerges that there really isn’t much going on; in fact, the owner asks O’Keefe if he knows of a way to apply for government grants.

Elsewhere, O’Keefe tries to get information about the operations of several huge residential centers for unaccompanied minors and tries to spin their refusal to give him access to the centers or submit to interviews as evidence of the existence of vast, government-funded child sex trafficking networks. But it seems more likely, though no less troubling, that the open borders policy of the last four years has created a tremendous humanitarian crisis of alien children roaming the continent by themselves, and the government is probably trying to keep them from becoming prey to sex traffickers while they sort out where to send them. Though O’Keefe does not uncover a salacious network of child predators, his vigorous pursuit of the truth does reveal the existence of a large, shadowy, government-funded, and lucrative system of child “welfare.”

So, “Line In The Sand” is correct in the larger sense that billions of dollars are being spent managing this human flow, and many people are getting rich off of it. The last thing these parasitical administrators of the nonprofit industrial complex want is for the border to close. O’Keefe does a great job of capturing in real time the corruption of a local New York City nonprofit called La Jornada, whose leader, Pedro Rodriguez, evidently perpetrates fraud, demanding fees for services that the city provides for free. O’Keefe also sends a Spanish-speaking reporter undercover into the Roosevelt Hotel, New York City’s main processing center for newly-arrived migrants, which offers him free housing, medical care, and even airplane tickets, even though the reporter explains that he has no identification of any sort. How, O’Keefe asks, in our post 9/11 security-obsessed era, are we to make sense of a system that admits millions of unvetted foreigners into the country, and then offers to fly them anywhere they care to go?

“Line In The Sand” is rough in parts, but intentionally so. Its subject is so sprawling and tangled that a neat and clean representation would be a lie. Even with a nine-figure budget – which this film assuredly did not have – a documentary about the border and the 30 million-footed human swarm that has crossed it would be messy and incomplete. But James O’Keefe and his small team have done something remarkable. They have taken on the decade’s biggest story, given it form, and preserved the humanity of its subjects. It is worth watching.

Seth Barron is a writer in New York and author of the forthcoming “Weaponized from Humanix.”

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/07/2024 – 17:30