Tell me again why we're in NATO, especially if, as the NYT tells us, it comprises just us and Canada?

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Victor Davis Hanson: Trump didn’t wreck NATO — he just exposed its anti-US hypocrisy

…. All the US had initially requested was basing support in disarming a common Western enemy that, for nearly half a century, has slaughtered American diplomats and soldiers and tried to kill an American president and secretary of state.

But most NATO members could not even offer tacit help.

Some damned the US effort as either illegal or unnecessary.

The American public watched the British waffle for days over permitting the US to use their Diego Garcia airbase.

The Spanish banned American use of their NATO bases and airspace.

The Italians refused a request from American bombers to land and refuel at a Sicilian NATO base.

Many NATO heads of state rebuked the United States to their domestic audiences while, in typical two-faced fashion, publicly offering empty verbal support for the US campaign.

The NATO response to an Iranian missile aimed at fellow NATO member Turkey was anemic.

Even worse was the pathetic British reaction to another Iranian missile launched at a British base at Akrotiri, Cyprus.

Yet neutering a theocratic Iran is clearly of benefit to Europe.

So is preventing the international waters of the Strait of Hormuz from becoming a tollbooth run by the Iranian regime.

Such passivity stood in sharp contrast to the five-year-long Ukraine War on Europe’ border.

Ukraine is not a NATO member.

Nonetheless, Europeans made urgent requests for the US to honor the spirit of NATO solidarity and help protect Europe’s territorial integrity.

Yet continental Europe is not intrinsically weak.

The combined population of the European Union and European NATO members is around 450 million — more than 100 million greater than that of the United States.

These same European nations enjoy an aggregate annual GDP of more than $22 trillion, 10 times the size of the Russian economy.

European diffidence comes on top of Trump’s perennial effort to harangue NATO members into honoring their commitments to spend 2% of GDP on defense — especially in the case of deadbeat Spain and Canada, which for years have welched on their pledges.

Trump’s rhetoric is not what has undermined NATO.

Instead, he ripped off a happy-face scab and exposed a festering wound of increasingly anti-American hypocrisy beneath.

If you wanted to wreck the alliance, there would be no better way than to follow the duplicitous example of Western Europe’s NATO members.

But at least there’s happy news on another front:

UPDATE: Josh Hammer asks the same thing: “What Exactly is the Purpose of NATO in the Year 2026?”