Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs reacted to a post by American billionaire Elon Musk in which he questioned the meaning of NATO’s existence.
He wrote about this in X.
“Dear Elon Musk, the reason why NATO was created, exists and will continue to exist is because of Russia and other enemies of the free world,” Rinkevics said in his post.
Dear @elonmusk, the reason NATO was founded, exists and will last is Russia and other enemies of the free world https://t.co/ptrgstpS2N
– Edgars Rinkēvičs (@edgarsrinkevics) March 3, 2024
Prior to that, Musk said that he “always wondered why NATO continued to exist despite the fact that its enemy and reason for existence, the Warsaw Pact Organization, had collapsed.”
In fact, the Warsaw Pact was a reaction to NATO, not the other way around. The North Atlantic Alliance is a collective security system that does not target one specific enemy. NATO’s primary role is to ensure the freedom and security of its member states.
NATO skepticism in the United States
Earlier, U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump (who is backed by Musk) said he would “encourage” Russia to “do whatever it wants” with NATO members who do not spend enough on defense. After that, European officials even began to consider an alternative to NATO in case Trump won the election.
In addition, in January, Politico reported, citing European Commissioner Thierry Breton, that in 2020, then-U.S. President Trump privately told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that the United States would never come to the rescue if Europe was attacked. According to Trump, “NATO is dead.”
Trump has voiced similar thoughts before. In an interview with Bloomberg back in 2016, he said that “NATO is outdated” because it was founded “many years ago, when everything was different.” In addition, in an interview with CNN, Trump said that the US participation in NATO “costs us too much money” and that other members of the Alliance “should be contributing more.”
In December 2023, the US Congress passed a bill on defense policy, which, among other things, prohibits any US president from withdrawing the United States from NATO without the consent of Congress.
