Why is Trump's anti-ally protectionism so popular?

Great Debates
81

This is how NATO funding works. As usual, Trump doesn’t understand the system.

82

Well, you’d have to define what ‘fair’ is. The NATO guidelines are that member nations will spend a target of around 2% of GDP on their military defense. Sure, we can go into pirate rules and all that, but that’s what was agreed upon to be ‘fair’ at the onset, and I’ve never seen that overturned. So, I’d suggest that at least by this definition of ‘fair’, there are several NATO members who aren’t meeting that target (the majority in fact). Now, a case could be made that countries haven’t real fiscal issues can’t make those targets. I’d say that is reasonable. That still leaves several very wealthy members who aren’t paying their ‘fair’ share.

For some reason I can’t cut and paste on the board today, so just to answer running coach’s post, it’s militantly unsurprising that Trump doesn’t understand…well, anything (and if he’s talking about some ‘debt’ they owe us or the other members he’s particularly clueless, which is hard for him to be MORE clueless than usual). However, I think that from a US perspective, irrespective of Trump (Obama and Bush had similar complaints, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Clinton didn’t as well) that there are several NATO members who aren’t paying their ‘fair’ share for our collective defense, and that the US pays a disproportionately higher amount both in overall terms and in percentage of GDP.

83

OTOH

  1. you guys also benefit a lot more from NATO than we do (we don’t get to set up forward bases on your continent, for example ; or project our forces the way you do), also keep a stranglehold on its leadership, C&C and decision-making

  2. you guys were going to do that anyway. Prove me wrong. Stop paying too.

  3. do we have a serious threat that needs containing RIGHT NOW ? Are the day to day operations of NATO compromised or inefficient or in some sort of crisis I’m not aware of ? It’s not like zee Russians are massing tanks near the Fulda Gap any more (plus Trump would probably pull out if that were the case, soooo…)

  4. WTF does any of that has to do with international trade, exactly ?

84

It is also hardy truthful.

Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States, 2018

United States International Trade Commission is the agency which administers the HTS, though its interpretation is the prerogative of US Customs.
The USITC websiteis apparently under maintenance and offline at the moment, gawd knows they probably have a lot of stuff to review at the moment.

If you want to look at the hardcopy version, well it’s a very, very substantial document.
Comes in about 15 volumes and takes up as much room on the corporate book shelf as a full copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica, if you remember such things of antiquity.

To give you a sense of the scale of the USA’s Harmonized Tariff Schedule the Section & Chapter titles are listed below: