Donald Trump recently made a series of comments on Fox News regarding the role of allies in recent conflicts: “They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan… and they did, they stayed a little back… a little off the front lines”.
This has offended many, including in the UK, which was among several allies to join the US in Afghanistan after NATO’s collective security clause was invoked for the first and only time in its history following the 9/11 attacks.
Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty states that an attack on one member is considered an attack against all. It is the basis for all NATO countries’ security, including Greenland. As members of NATO, Greenland and Denmark’s security is therefore protected by all NATO countries, despite Trump’s erroneous, currently abandoned, argument that the US must own Greenland to protect it from Russia.
Disregarding Article 5, Trump told Fox News on 22 January that he was “not sure” the military alliance would be there for the US “if we ever needed them. We’ve never needed them,” he said, adding: “We have never really asked anything of them”.
Responding on Friday, the UK Prime Minister’s official spokesperson said: “The President was wrong to diminish the role of NATO troops, including British forces”. He added that NATO troops made sacrifices “in the service of collective security and in response to an attack on our ally”.
During the Afghanistan conflict, 457 British service personnel were killed. Most of the those who died in Afghanistan over a period of nearly 20 years were killed in Helmand. Many hundreds more suffered life-changing injuries and lost limbs.
In the autumn of 1968, Donald J Trump received a timely diagnosis from a family friend that he had bone spurs in his heels that led to a medical exemption from the military during the Vietnam war.
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