By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.
WASHINGTON: Good news for NATO: Sen. Tom Cotton — Iraq veteran, Tea Party star, and potential Defense Secretary for Donald Trump — said that America’s commitment to defend its NATO allies must be “iron-clad” and that Russia must change its ways before relations can improve.
During the campaign, Trump famously praised Vladimir Putin and said the US might not defend the Baltic States against a Russian attack if they didn’t “fulfill their obligations to us” to spend on their own defense. But just after the election, President Obama said that Trump was committed to NATO. That’s the context for this morning’s comments from Cotton, who visited Latvia’s president in September; no establishment internationalist Republican, the 39-year-old Arkansan veteran in fact is rumored to be a top pick for Trump’s Defense Secretary.
“The best way to deter that kind of conflict…is to be iron-clad in our support of our NATO allies,” Cotton told the DefenseOne Summit when asked point-blank about Trump’s statement on a possible Baltic war.
But what about the allies that don’t reach the alliance goal of spending two percent of GDP on defense? “Article 5 is a treaty commitment,” said Cotton, referring to the clause in the North Atlantic Treaty that says an attack on one signatory is an attack on all. “The 2 percent defense spend is a political commitment. There’s a difference.”
Read the full story at Breaking Defense