Matthew Whitaker just called NATO's current meltdown "growing pains." The same phrase your mom used when you were twelve and couldn't dunk a basketball. You still can't dunk. NATO still can't agree on who pays for what.
Growing pains. The alliance spent seventy-five years not growing at all, then Trump showed up twice and suddenly everyone's having a growth spurt. Germany went from spending 1.5% of GDP on defense to promising 3.5%. That's not growth. That's a man finally reading his wife's texts after she said "we need to talk" fourteen times.
Whitaker's job is to stand in Brussels and pretend the screaming match is actually a productive dialogue. He's the guy at Thanksgiving dinner saying "I think we're all making great points" while your uncle throws mashed potatoes at the wall. Except the uncle has nuclear weapons and the mashed potatoes cost forty billion dollars.
The word "crisis" got rejected. Too scary. Crises require action plans and emergency meetings. Growing pains just require time and maybe some ibuprofen. You can ignore growing pains. You cannot ignore France threatening to build its own defense structure because Trump asked them to pay their phone bill.
Retail traders saw "NATO tensions" in a headline and immediately checked if Lockheed Martin stock moved. It didn't. They checked Raytheon. Nothing. They panic-sold their tech stocks anyway because that's what they do when they see words they don't understand. NATO could dissolve tomorrow and some guy in Ohio would still be asking Reddit if he should buy the dip on AMD.
Whitaker gets paid to call a dumpster fire a bonfire. The allies get to pretend they're not being shaken down. Trump gets to say he fixed NATO by breaking it first. Everyone wins except the English language, which just lost another perfectly good phrase to diplomatic horsesh*t.
Photo by History in HD on Unsplash
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