David E. Sanger

But there's kind of no follow up about what the strategy would be to avoid future war with Iran.

Well, Natalie, there's a lot of discussion and a lot of criticism of our closest allies, the Europeans.

You know, I think the first thing that you see in this document is something that's pretty familiar to us all from the first term and certainly from the past year, which is that America is tired of supporting the allies, that it won't put up with Europe's trade blocs anymore.

that is frustrated with the European Union, which of course the president has said was built to screw the United States, that we can't necessarily be supporting them in their conventional defense.

And it makes clear that they have to go do that themselves.

Now, the fact of the matter is,

As the document acknowledges, the Europeans made a lot of progress in this regard over the past year.

And you may remember that back over the summer, they committed to spend up to 5% of their GDP on defense.

And that was a huge win for President Trump.

And in my mind, something that was really long overdue and one of the big successes that he had this year.

A huge increase.

Some of it's for concrete defense.

And I think it's certainly fair to say that his threat to leave NATO and to abandon Europe certainly focused their attention.

The next big debate we have, of course, is whether or not it was in our interest as well, because we get a lot of benefits from a tight alliance with the Europeans who can act as a deterrent against war with Russia and other bad actors.

So yes, it was a big win.

It may have come at some long-term cost.

But let's acknowledge that President Trump was able to do what Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Trump himself in his first term proved unable to do, which is get the Europeans belatedly to take their defense seriously.

So, Natalie, the Russia section of this is one of the strangest because it suggests that the Europeans were a greater threat to themselves than Russia is to the future of Europe.

And this is the exact opposite of how the Europeans view it, because they believe now that Russia

Russia is an existential threat to them.