By Paul Krugman / The New York Times
It wasn’t the biggest whopper of the night, but during last Tuesday’s debate, Donald Trump — who refused to say that Ukraine should win its war — said some false things about the role our allies are playing. Again, let me give you the full statement, with no sanewashing:
“I want the war to stop. I want to save lives that are being uselessly — people being killed by the millions. It’s the millions. It’s so much worse than the numbers that you’re getting, which are fake numbers. Look, we’re in for $250 billion or more because they don’t ask Europe, which is a much bigger beneficiary to getting this thing done than we are. They’re in for $150 billion less because Biden and you don’t have the courage to ask Europe like I did with NATO. They paid billions and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars when I said either you pay up or we’re not going to protect you anymore. So that may be one of the reasons they don’t like me as much as they like weak people. But you take a look at what’s happening. We’re in for $250 to $275 billion. They’re into $100 to $150. They should be forced to equalize.”
I’m not sure why he thinks it necessary to claim that the casualty numbers are fake. But I do know that he loves to claim that our allies aren’t paying their share. Except that’s completely wrong. I wrote about this a few months ago: Europe is spending considerably more on Ukraine than we are.
It’s true that America, with its much bigger defense industry, is supplying most of the weapons. But we are not bearing most of the monetary burden.
For Trump, of course, the claim that Europe isn’t helping serves the purpose of portraying the Biden-Harris administration as weak. But it just isn’t true.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.
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