Ex-Trump official bewildered at Pentagon's 'remarkably ignorant statement' on leaked plans

Leaked internal communications from the Pentagon revealed Thursday that the Trump administration has considered methods to punish NATO allies that refused to support the United States in its war against Iran, and the Pentagon’s response left one security expert dumbfounded.

First reported on by Reuters, an internal Pentagon email outlined options for the United States to punish members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which included suspending Spain from NATO entirely. While several NATO nations have refused to assist the United States in its war against Iran, Spain issued a particularly scathing rebuke of the Trump administration in response to its calls for assistance.

When asked about the internal email, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson issued the following statement to Reuters: “As President Trump has said, despite everything that the United States has done for our NATO allies, they were not there for us.”

The statement left Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security senior official under both the Trump and Bush administrations, bewildered.

“This is a remarkably ignorant statement. NATO’s founding logic is collective defense – the bedrock guarantee that an attack on one is an attack on all,” Taylor wrote on his Substack, Defiance.

“What the Trump administration is now proposing, in effect, is a conditional inversion of that principle: we will support you… but only if you supported us first… in a war of our choosing… on the terms we set… and on which you had no say. In my view, that’s a bit closer to the logic of a protection racket than an actual alliance.”

Furthermore, Taylor warned that the Trump administration’s new approach to the nearly 80-year alliance was being staged at a particularly “dangerous” moment in time.

“Donald Trump is making the implosion of NATO a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Taylor wrote. “He’s already shown that Washington is worse than a fickle anchor of the alliance. It’s a vindictive one, doing deep damage to the compact from the inside.”