British Prime Minister Keir Starmer slammed US President Donald Trump’s NATO remarks as “insulting.”
According to Associated Press, Starmer signaled Friday, January 23, that Trump should apologize for his false assertion that troops from non-US NATO countries avoided the front line during the Afghanistan war, describing Trump’s remarks as “frankly appalling.”
Trump’s comment that he wasn’t sure the other 31 nations in NATO would be there to support the United States if and when requested, provoked outrage and distress across the United Kingdom. regardless of individuals’ political persuasion.
Trump said of non-US troops in an interview with Fox Business Network in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, “We’ve never needed them, we have never really asked anything of them. You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan, or this or that, and they did — they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.”
That view stands at odds with the reality that in October 2001, nearly a month after the September 11, attacks, the U.S. led an international coalition in Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaida, which had used the country as its base, and the group’s Taliban hosts.
Alongside the US were troops from dozens of countries, including from NATO, whose mutual-defense mandate had been triggered for the first time after the attacks on New York and Washington.
