NATO’s place in the global economy
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 21 February 2024
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After former President Trump’s recent digs at NATO, officials at a global security conference in Munich over the weekend weighed what European countries would do if Trump were re-elected and abandoned the United States’ treaty commitments. On the show today, Kathleen McInnis, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, discusses the history and future of NATO and why it matters to the global economy. We’ll also share our takeaways from Fani Willis’ testimony. Plus, a former NASA astronaut was wrong about what we (earthlings) gain from going to space.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
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- “Trump said he might ignore NATO’s duty to defend. Here’s what the group does.” from The Washington Post
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- “NATO’s Article 5 Collective Defense Obligations, Explained” from Brennan Center for Justice
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- “Why Americans Still Need NATO” from Foreign Policy
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- “Trump didn’t quit NATO, but a potential second term alarms allies” from The Washington Post
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- “The life and testimony of Fani Willis’s father, John Floyd III” from The Washington Post
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- “How the Freedman’s Bank failure still impacts Black Americans” from Marketplace
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- “Elon Musk’s SpaceX Forges Closer Ties With U.S. Spy and Military Agencies” from The Wall Street Journal
We want to hear your answer to the Make Me Smart question. You can reach us at makemesmart@marketplace.org or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everybody I'm Kimberly Adams. |
| 0:05.0 | Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. |
| 0:12.0 | I'm Kyra, thanks for joining us everybody on this |
| 0:14.4 | Tuesday the 20th of February. One show on topic is what we do on Tuesdays. Today we're |
| 0:19.8 | going to do NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for those of you unfamiliar. |
| 0:24.4 | It's a 75-ish or so military-year-old military alliance that has been in the news of late. |
| 0:31.8 | Thank you to the former president, and also, not coincidentally, |
| 0:36.2 | sort of many of the things that are going on over in Europe. |
| 0:38.4 | Anyway, we're going to talk about that today. |
| 0:41.2 | Yeah, I mean, Trump made these comments saying, you know, that he wouldn't mind changing up the way things go in NATO, and this has been dominating discussions, including at this big international security conference that happened in Munich over the weekend. |
| 0:55.0 | People were talking about the US as possible withdrawal from NATO, |
| 0:59.0 | but we want to take a little bit of a step back and look at how NATO is structured, how it works, why it's so crucial |
| 1:05.8 | right now. |
| 1:06.8 | So here to make us smart about all of this is Kathleen McInnes. |
| 1:10.4 | She's a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. |
| 1:14.4 | Welcome to the show. |
| 1:15.6 | Thank you so much for having me. |
| 1:17.8 | So why was NATO originally established and talk us through how it came about? |
| 1:25.0 | So at the end of World War II, the leaders of the United States and Europe were sort of looking around at different security |
| 1:35.2 | arrangements and noticing that the Soviet Union was becoming a more belligerent actor, to put it mildly. |
| 1:41.7 | So they started establishing this North Atlantic Treaty |
| 1:44.8 | organization to aggregate military capabilities and to start holding the line against an aggressive and expansionist Soviet Union. the tagline line, |
... |
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