James Stavridis: ‘Foolish’ and ‘Ignorant’ of Trump to Threaten Our NATO Allies

EXCERPT:

STAVRIDIS: "Terribly dangerous, and lives will be lost, particularly if he goes the next step and does something or attempts to do something truly foolish, ignorant. And that would be to pull out of NATO. I mean, let's -- let's just do the numbers for one second. NATO is 32 countries, it's 55 percent of the world's GDP. It's 3 million troops, active duty, well-trained, competent, almost all volunteers. It's got a collective defense budget of a trillion dollars. And oh, by the way, on the point of defense budgets, and back to the 'Sir, will you pay us -- defend us if we don't pay?' Again, let's do the numbers for a minute. U.S. spends $700 billion a year on defense. The Europeans collectively spend over 300 billion, it's the second largest defense budget in the world. That's more than China's spends. And by the way, it's three times what Russia spends.”