Is Nato obsolete?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2019
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Donald Trump is threatening to withdraw the US from Nato while the French President Emmanuel Macron has called it “brain dead”. Charmaine Cozier asks if the 70-year-alliance can survive?
She speaks to Jacob Heilbrunn from The National Interest think tank – a right of centre foreign policy think tank based in Washington; Fabrice Pothier - senior defence consulting fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and former Nato policy planning director; Sara Bjerg Moller, assistant professor of international security at the School of Diplomacy and International Relations, Seton Hall University in the US; Elisabeth Braw, senior research fellow, RUSI's Modern Deterrence project
Producer: Helen Grady
(Photo: President Macron, PM Boris Johnson and Canada's PM Justin Trudeau at the Nato summit reception. Credit: Nato TV/AFP/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the inquiry with me Charmeikosia. |
| 0:03.4 | Each week one question, four expert witnesses and an answer. |
| 0:08.0 | The US President Donald Trump is hosting a lunch at a luxury hotel and golf course just outside London. |
| 0:17.0 | He's there for a leaders meeting of members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO. |
| 0:27.2 | This is a lunch that's on me, declares the President as he sits down with his eight specially |
| 0:31.8 | invited guests. |
| 0:35.0 | NATO has 29 members. |
| 0:38.0 | So what's so special about Britain, Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Poland, Lithuania and Romania. |
| 0:47.0 | Well, along with the US, they all put at least 2% of their GDP into defense budgets. President Trump calls them the 2%ers. |
| 0:57.0 | Excluded from the occasion are the remaining 20 leaders who are in the same hotel. |
| 1:06.0 | NATO was founded 70 years ago with a broad aim of maintaining peace in Europe. |
| 1:11.0 | This anniversary has been overshadowed by an internal war of words. |
| 1:15.6 | The 2% to lunch is just one example of tensions among NATO members spilling out into |
| 1:21.6 | public view. So this week we're asking is NATO obsolete. |
| 1:27.0 | Part one. Part 1, 1 for all and all for 1. |
| 1:37.0 | President Trump could prove to be the gravedigger of this international alliance. |
| 1:48.0 | Jacob Halbrun is editor of the National Interest, a foreign policy magazine based in Washington DC. |
| 1:55.0 | Like many defense experts he's worried about President Trump's approach to NATO. |
| 2:00.0 | He regards it largely as impotent and obsolete and would prefer the United States that can act |
| 2:07.2 | independently of its allies to move militarily whenever and wherever it pleases. |
| 2:15.0 | Twelve Atlantic Pact nations meets for the first time. |
| 2:21.0 | U.S. Defense Secretary Johnson is named General... The United States was one of the founding members of NATO when it began in |
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