politics

This is such a silly an short-sighted proposal.

The proponents of this view this as a transactional relationship with only two components:

• allies pay in full
• allies NATO support

What's absent is the massive amounts of benefits the USA gets in soft political power from a united NATO block. Simply the threat of NATO defense to aggression is incredibly cost effective form of defense. Much of the USA's power in the world is international commerce. Commerce demands stable and safe nations that are willing to spend their money. That's the primary benefit to the world of USA's military.

As just one example; billions of people around the world are rocking Intel, AMD, or ARM based CPUs in their computers and phones because those designs to envision them and the logistics to move them to you all exist at the consumer level. Political barriers to exporting designs and products were largely open because nations weren't worried about their neighbor accessing this technology and using it militarily against them. This is just one small example of how the USA benefits from healthy markets derived partially because of NATO and article 5 protection.

The GOP wants to throw away all that soft power instead of using soft power to get what they want in less direct ways.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Just after dawn on Tuesday, the Senate passed a $95 billion national security package with aid to Ukraine and Israel, setting up a showdown with the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson suggested he would not bring it up for a vote.

In a statement on Monday night in the hours before the bill passed the Senate, Mr. Johnson said the House would “continue to work its own will” on national security and border policies, which Republicans had insisted be a part of the foreign aid package, before killing a bipartisan deal to address them.

Democrats are broadly supportive of the package, as is a bloc of more mainstream and national security-minded Republicans similar to the one that helped push the legislation through the Senate.

But Senate Republicans tanked a version of the bill last week that included measures to crack down on the border, which they cast as too weak and viewed as politically inconvenient for Mr. Trump.

That prompted Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, to strip out the border measures and push through the foreign aid package on its own.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the right-wing Republican of Georgia, has threatened to bring up a motion to oust Mr. Johnson from the speakership if he puts legislation to aid to Ukraine on the floor.

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