US allies get a Signal chat’s worth of red flags

IF EUROPEANS didn’t already know what the new administration in Washington thinks and wants of them, they now do: “PATHETIC” and cash, respectively. This is thanks to the hard-to-credit decision of President Donald Trump’s top security officials to chat about an imminent military strike against targets in Yemen on a publicly available texting app, and to include a journalist by mistake.

- By Marc Champion

For a continent already worried that Trump may not honor any NATO Article 5 request or would be willing to shake down allies by withholding the spare parts and software upgrades needed to keep their F-35 Joint Strike Fighters flying, the content of this unintentionally leaked discussion has provided confirmation.

In the short term, that may have few real consequences.

Although insulting, the administration’s assessment of Europe’s weak military capabilities is correct. The resulting dependency on US military might has made European states highly vulnerable to extortion by their now-former ally. Longer term, though, the drive to move away from buying US arms and build European will be overwhelming. Charles de Gaulle, the postwar French president who in 1966 pulled France out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s integrated command structures to avoid just such dependencies, has been vindicated from his grave.

US allies in the Asia Pacific and Middle East can only conclude that this might soon be them, too, should Trump and his officials ever decide that they aren’t paying enough for their defense or making sufficient trade concessions.

Russia and China, meanwhile, will also draw conclusions, though viewed from their perspective this offers exploitable opportunities. At least as important as all this is that America’s friends and foes alike are finding out what happens when you get a group of poorly qualified ideologues to run the most powerful military in the world. The short answer is either recklessness or, under a more generous interpretation, a group with a steep learning curve.