Russia and Putin · 2024 campaign · № 73
Campaign video pledged to 'fundamentally' re-evaluate NATO and said Russia is not the West's greatest threat
“Finally, we have to finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally reevaluating NATO's purpose and NATO's mission. Our foreign policy establishment keeps trying to pull the world into conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia based on the lie that Russia represents our greatest threat. But the greatest threat to Western civilization today is not Russia.”
- Said
- , Agenda47 campaign video, 'Preventing World War III'
- Subject
- Agenda47 NATO video
- Type
- NATO and allies
- Topic
- Ukraine & Russia
- Era
- 2024 campaign
What happened
In a campaign policy video released March 16, 2023, Trump said the 'proxy battle in Ukraine' risked global war, that the objective must be 'a total cessation of hostilities' and that the State Department, defense bureaucracy and intelligence services should be 'completely overhauled and reconstituted.' He pledged to finish 'fundamentally reevaluating NATO's purpose and NATO's mission' and said the greatest threat to Western civilization was 'ourselves' rather than Russia. The video was released three weeks after the first anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion. He returned to the NATO theme at a February 10, 2024 rally in South Carolina, saying he would 'encourage' Russia to do 'whatever the hell they want' to allies that did not meet spending targets.