Trump continues to attack allies instead of enemies of the US

streiff:
Before his half-assed endorsement of, and subsequent snub by, Paul Ryan yesterday, Donald Trump was on the road in Iowa spreading the Gospel of Small Thinking to his followers.

As has been his pattern of late, he turned his harshest fire not on our rivals/enemies on the world stage, North Korea, Iran, Russia, Communist China, but rather on our allies. In recent days, his target has been the NATO alliance. (See my posts here |here | here.) Each of his NATO pronouncements has two parts that are utterly predictable when dealing with Trump, a) he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about and b) he knows no more about the US Constitution than your typical hog knows about differential equations. And there is a third, more surprising, theme, he is pushing the Kremlin's propaganda and story line about NATO.

In Iowa, it was Japan that drew his ire.
...
I suppose that Trump's objective with this criticism is to get allies to make a larger contribution to their own defense.  There are more politics ways to push that agenda if that is his objective.   What he does not apparently understand about Japan is that it is constitutionally forbidden from having a strong military.  It is something that was imposed on Japan by the US at the end of World War II.  The defense pact that Trump complains about was necessitated by our refusal to let them remilitarize after the war.

While it may be time to change their constitutional prohibition against militarization, there is probably a better way to sell that than to blame them for a situation the US imposed on them.

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