A Truly Dangerous Candidate in Trump

WaPo says Trump is unprecedented threat to American democracy. An unprecedented editorial.

Donald Trump’s nomination is the first time American politics has left me truly afraid

Donald Trump’s NATO comments are the scariest thing he’s said

Wednesday night, Donald Trump said something that made a nuclear war between the United States and Russia more likely. With a few thoughtless words, he made World War III — the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in nuclear holocaust — plausible.

This probably scans like hyperbole, the kind of thing you hear a lot in politics. I assure you, it’s not. Not this time.

What Trump said, in an interview published by the New York Times, is that he wouldn’t necessarily defend the United States’ allies in NATO if they were attacked by a foreign power. This extended, Trump said, to the Baltic countries right on Russia’s border — countries Russia might conceivably invade.

The NATO alliance is the key deterrent against this: It is founded on a promise that an attack on one NATO country is an attack on all. Trump is directly undermining this promise.

The consequences are hard to overstate. He is trashing one of the foundations of the postwar European order, which has helped guaranteed peace on the continent for 70 years. And by equivocating on whether he would defend the Baltics, he creates a dangerous amount of uncertainty among Russians as to how seriously the US takes its NATO treaty commitments — the kind of uncertainty that, yes, could spark an actual conflict between the US and Russia.

This is what happens when you let a flamboyant reality star get this close to the highest office in the land: You get someone who doesn’t understand the machinery of state, and plays with literal nuclear fire as a result.

 

 (short answer is "no")