Doubling down on yesterday’s NATO warnings to President-elect Donald Trump, German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen has delivered her own high-profile warnings to Trump, insisting he mustn’t view NATO as a “business” and must instead accept that NATO is “an alliance of shared values.”
Von der Leyen instead took shots at Trump for campaigning on questions about the relevance of NATO in the post-Cold War era, accusing Trump of “trying to get as much money out of NATO as possible,” and accusing him of not caring about NATO’s long history.
She went on to demand Trump immediately declare which side he is on, whether “he’s on the side of peace and democracy or whether he doesn’t care about all that and instead he’s looking for a best buddy” in Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Von der Leyen insisted that the US owes NATO for them standing together after 9/11, and that this means a US president mustn’t get too close with a Russian president, and that doing so would insist that “the values we share don’t matter.”
