BEnni Schmidt Pedersen lives on a small farm in Denmark, the place it’s quiet and he can hear if anybody is coming down the gravel street to his dwelling. He’s stricken with PTSD from his time as a soldier in Afghanistan, the place 5 members of his 130-person firm died within the American-led struggle towards the Taliban.
I known as him in the present day to learn him a quote from President Trump about America’s NATO allies: “We’ve by no means wanted them,” Trump mentioned in a Fox Enterprise interview on the World Financial Discussion board, in Davos. “We’ve by no means actually requested something of them. You already know, they’ll say they despatched some troops to Afghanistan or this or that. They usually did. They stayed somewhat again, little off the entrance strains.”
First Pedersen laughed. Then he tried to brush it off—traditional Trump bluster. “Why doesn’t it shock me that he’s saying that?”
Lastly, his voice dropped an octave. “That’s bullshit,” he mentioned.
It’s, certainly, bullshit. The US invoked Article 5, the mutual-defense clause of NATO’s founding constitution, the day after the September 11 assaults. It stays the one time in NATO’s almost 80-year historical past that the duty of widespread protection has been activated. All 28 members of the alliance on the time despatched troopers to Afghanistan. Many by no means returned.
Take into account these numbers:
An estimated 3,500 troopers from NATO nations died in Afghanistan. The US suffered probably the most losses in absolute phrases: Almost 2,500 U.S. service members had been killed within the 20-year struggle. However per capita, Denmark suffered much more extreme losses, burying 43 troopers in a inhabitants, on the time, of about 5.5 million.
Different NATO members sacrificed, too. Britain misplaced about 450 troopers, Canada greater than 150. Different small nations, like Denmark, weren’t spared: Estonia misplaced 9 troopers. Norway, 10. Czech Republic, 14. Romania, 27.
Why does this matter now? As a result of Trump has been disparaging Europe’s contributions to NATO, and Denmark’s particularly, as he threatened to take over a part of the Nordic nation’s territory. Yesterday, he prevented doing what many feared he may. He informed an viewers in Davos that he wouldn’t use navy pressure to accumulate his coveted Greenland, which might have put an abrupt finish to the alliance. However he made his disdain for NATO clear: “The US is handled very unfairly by NATO. I wish to inform you that. When you consider it, no person can dispute it. We give a lot, and we get so little in return.”
That prompted a little bit of fact-checking by NATO’s secretary-general, Mark Rutte. Privately, Rutte met with Trump and satisfied him to just accept a framework for negotiations that would see an enhanced U.S. navy presence on Greenland in addition to stepped-up NATO efforts within the broader Arctic area. Each are choices that Denmark and different alliance members have been open to, and actually inspired, all alongside. In a public portion of their assembly, Rutte challenged Trump’s account of NATO’s steadfastness. “There may be one factor I heard you say yesterday and in the present day. You weren’t completely positive that the Europeans would come to the rescue of the U.S. if you can be attacked,” Rutte informed Trump. “Let me inform you, they may. They usually did in Afghanistan.”
Rutte continued: “For each two People who paid the final word value, there was one soldier from one other NATO nation who didn’t come again to his household.”
Trump, whose bone-spurs prognosis in 1968 made him exempt from service in Vietnam, appears to not have taken kindly to the historical past lesson. So he provided his personal, make-believe historical past of NATO exercise in Afghanistan, in an interview with Fox’s Maria Bartiromo. The notion that troopers from NATO allies “stayed somewhat again, little off the entrance strains” is fake, Pedersen, the Danish veteran, informed me. He deployed in 2010, the deadliest yr for NATO forces, with some 700 fatalities. (Trump was internet hosting two seasons of his Apprentice TV sequence that yr and toying publicly with a presidential bid.)
Pedersen’s firm labored in Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan. 5 of the corporate’s members had been killed, together with Sophia Bruun, the primary feminine soldier to die in fight in Danish historical past, whose service I wrote about final week. Seventy-eight had been injured, Pedersen mentioned. They confronted off with Taliban fighters almost each different day.
“We had been on the entrance strains, the identical because the People,” he mentioned. “That was our job.”
