U.S. allies get a Signal chat's worth of red flags
This is thanks to the hard-to-credit decision of U.S. President Donald Trump's top security officials to chat about an imminent military strike against targets in Yemen on a publicly available texting app — and to include a journalist by mistake. For a continent already worried that Trump may not honor any NATO Article 5 request or would be willing to shake down allies by withholding the spare parts and software upgrades needed to keep their F-35 Joint Strike Fighters flying, the content of this unintentionally leaked discussion has provided confirmation.
In the short term, that may have few real consequences. Although insulting, the administration's assessment of Europe's weak military capabilities is correct. The resulting dependency on U.S. military might has made European states highly vulnerable to extortion by their now-former ally. Longer term, though, the drive to move away from buying U.S. arms and build European will be overwhelming. Charles de Gaulle, the postwar French president who in 1966 pulled France out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's integrated command structures to avoid just such dependencies, has been vindicated from his grave.
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