The world takes Trump’s Nato comments literally, while Maga takes them seriously

Perhaps nothing symbolises the shift from the old-school Reaganite Republican Party to the Maga-fied manifestation that dominates politics today than the shift from Mitt Romney to Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

In 2012, Romney, then the Republican presidential nominee, famously called Russia “without question, our number one geopolitical foe.” Democrats dismissed him as daft in a world with al-Qaeda and China on the rise. Barack Obama chided him and said “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

Russia’s annexation of Crimea, its meddling in the 2016 presidential election and its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 vindicated Romney and showed the threat of President Vladimir Putin. But by that point, the GOP had moved on from the Reagan-Bush-Romney worldview and embraced another businessman-turned-politician in Donald Trump.

This weekend, when he held a rally in South Carolina, Trump all but goaded Putin into invading European countries when he recalled that he told a head of state of a Nato country talking about Russia during his presidency that if the country did not pay its obligations “I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.”

The remarks directly contradict Article 5 of the Nato charter, which says that all Nato members will respond to an attack on one member nation. Nato famously mobilised to the aid of the United States after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Not surprisingly, Romney denounced the remarks.

“He says outrageous things to get people riled up,” Romney told The Independent. “It works at the rallies. Unfortunately, it also has an impact around the world where our friends