Donald Trump will destroy the NATO alliance and end the proxy conflict with Russia if he returns to the White House, former defense secretary Mark Esper fears.
“With regard to NATO, and having lived through this with him, I think one of the first things that would happen is he would withdraw support for Ukraine. And of course if that were to happen, I think the whole effort to support Ukraine in its war against Russia would eventually crumble. Because the United States is kind of like the big block in the Jenga tower – you pull us out and everything else collapses,” the former Trump-era defense chief said in a television interview late Wednesday.
“But I think his next move would be to begin pulling us out of NATO, certainly troops out of NATO countries, and eventually that could cause the collapse of the alliance. And that’s exactly what Vladimir Putin would love to see, right? Is the collapse of NATO. And then the next [move] would be – does he start looking, as he would discuss with me and others at the time – does he look to pull troops out of Korea, out of Japan and out of other countries who are allied with us. So look, it’s quite disconcerting from a national security standpoint,” Esper said.
A US military withdrawal from across the world would make the US “less secure,” in Esper’s estimation.
“It would be a retreat from the global stage after 75 years of leadership around the world since the end of World War II…I think when that happens, you would see the international rules and norms that have been built up since that time eventually fade away and crumble as well,” the former defense secretary said, echoing the rhetoric of the Biden State Department.
“It would be a very bad situation. I won’t say as far as dystopian, but you would see so much of what we’ve come to know and experienced, so much of the global order, the rules, the regulations, the norms that have made us all prosperous and allowed us to advance and grow over the decades to really slowly erode and collapse,” Esper said.
Esper also expressed concerns that Trump will staff his Pentagon with loyalists this time around, pointing to figures picked in late 2020 for top jobs as his administration began to disintegrate after the November 2020 elections, including former national security advisor Robert O’Brien, one of the architects of Trump’s efforts to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, and former acting director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell.
Esper expects the first year of a second Trump term to echo the last few months of the last, now that he’s come to realize that “people are policy.”
“That’s trouble. As compared to having maybe a year, seven-eight months, which is when Trump really kicked into a different gear in 2020, he’ll have four years to go at it and really chip away at the institutions of government, at our norms, he’ll be able to enact his policy of revenge that he’s been talking about… It’s quite a dangerous time for our democracy if that were to happen,” Esper summed up.
6 December 2023, 21:36 GMT
Who is Mark Esper and Why is He Worried?
Esper served as Trump’s secretary of defense between July 2019 and November 2020 before getting fired for foot-dragging on the president’s effort to make good on pulling troops out of Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia toward the end of his term. Esper is one of dozens if of dyed in the wool neoconservatives whom Trump, a political novice, surrounded himself with after his surprise victory in 2016. These officials ultimately helped block Trump’s election promises to pull America out of its "forever wars" around the globe, and to improve relations with hostile powers.
Trump proved only partially successful, expressing pride after leaving office over the fact that he became the first president in decades not to start a new US war, resisting repeated prodding by his staff to start a war with Iran, and kicking off unprecedented, personal diplomacy-based talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un aimed at bringing peace to the Korean Peninsula. In other areas, Trump’s record was not as stellar, with ties with Russia and China remaining strained throughout his tenure, and the US failing to end its illegal occupation of Syria, with the Trump-appointed official in charge later openly bragging about how he fooled the president to keep the withdrawal from taking place.
13 November 2020, 18:42 GMT
Trump’s supporters have urged him not to make the same mistakes of hiring so many neocons to staff his new administration if he returned to power in 2024, prompting serious concerns from famous neocons including Robert Kagan, the husband of perennial State Department official Victoria Nuland, that Trump 2.0 would become a dangerous Julius Caesar-type figure who would go after his political enemies at home and surrender US imperial interests abroad.
To date, however, it has so far been only Trump that’s fallen victim to politicized charges, with the former president currently facing more than 700 years in prison if convicted on all counts against him, which range from the falsification of business records to pay off a porn star, to the mishandling of classified documents, and an alleged plot to overthrow the results of the 2020 election.