Trump Casts Doubt on Commitment to NATO Members.
CAMEROTA: In a new interview, President Trump questioned why the U.S. would defend a NATO ally?</s>TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS HOST: Why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack? Why is that needed?</s>TRUMP: I understand what you're saying. I've asked the same question. You know, Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people.</s>CARLSON: Yes, I'm not against Montenegro. Or Albania.</s>TRUMP: By the way, they're very strong people. They have very aggressive people. They may get aggressive, and congratulations, you're in World War III. Now, I understand that, but that's the way it was set up. Don't forget: I just got here a little more than a year and a half ago, but I took over the conversation three or four days ago, and I said, "You have to pay."</s>CAMEROTA: We're back now with CNN political analysts David Gregory and Margaret Talev and John Avlon. David Gregory, it's impossible to know how the president feels about NATO. He's all over the map. He's said so many schizophrenic things in just the past half a week. So I guess Article V doesn't count or he wants to change that?</s>GREGORY: Well, what's interesting is that what the president appears not to realize, because I don't think he's taken a lot of time to actually think about this, the only time that Article V was invoked was to defend the United States, and that was after 9/11. So to the notion that the United States set this up to, you know, be the world's policeman, to go, you know, defending Montenegro, I mean, is just so silly. I's actually a misnomer. It was only invoked to help the United States. And that's when countries like Germany actually sent forces to Afghanistan. So the whole thing is absurd. And what you're seeing is, yes, the president, again, in his mind, in his infatuation with strongman politics, particularly Vladimir Putin who has never liked NATO's growing role. Never liked when President Bush got out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty. You know, now has an ally in President Trump, who says yes, kind of shares this world view. He doesn't seem to value the western alliance. Doesn't seem to value Europe, calls the European Union a foe. It's just not the case. And most Republicans don't believe that. And Mitch McConnell saying yesterday it's important, you know, saying to the world, despite what the president of the United States says, it's important for our western allies to know that here in the Senate, we actually believe in the world as it was before Donald Trump and the importance of the alliance that was established after World War II. And so there's a lot of cleaning up to do beyond the theater of yesterday and changing his statement.</s>BERMAN: Look, I'm not disagreeing with you, because I don't do that.</s>CAMEROTA: Of course. We know better.</s>BERMAN: But when you say it's impossible to understand where the president stands on NATO, I think we can know exactly where he stands, because he has told us repeatedly, he does not believe in the foundational aspects of NATO. What he said about Montenegro there is not, like, some toss-away there. It is the central component to the NATO alliance. The president just told Tucker Carlson that he doesn't see a need to defend Montenegro. He doesn't see the need to defend a NATO ally. And Margaret, you know, I think if you track back the last week and understand how the president behaved and discussed NATO while he was there with other NATO leaders here, perhaps that's not surprising.</s>TALEV: I mean, I do want to say, Montenegro is like smaller than Washington, D.C.'s population, the newest member of NATO. And also contributed, committed to troops to support the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. So if you're a very small country, and you look at what Russia did with Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, and then you hear the president of the United States say this, you're terrified. So that happened. Also, you know, we heard the president last week. I asked him during the news conference in NATO, did he think that he could, if he were so inclined could he get the U.S. out of NATO without a congressional vote, and he said, yes, he thought he could, but that it wasn't necessary. So he's made his views on NATO pretty clear, and then walked those back, and then seems to be going back to the original --</s>AVLON: He's always going to -- he's always going to default back to his original instincts. The teleprompter Trump is not the real Trump. That's the State Department or the Pentagon, trying to get him in line. But what's really troubling about his statements about Montenegro in that particular interview is that he is again reciting Vladimir Putin's talking points. The specter that has been raised, as Margaret said, is all of these small countries, from the Baltic states to Montenegro, do you really want to go to war with them -- for them? Because that does cut to the heart of Article V. And the question of Crimea suggests, if one of those states were pushed back on by Russia, as they have long desired to do, claiming ethnic overlap and religious and historical connections, that could be a test of NATO without the president of the United States willing to back the central purpose of the organization. That's the real danger.</s>GREGORY: Right. And the central purpose being, too, as a check on Russia --</s>AVLON: Russia.</s>GREGORY: -- on the Soviet Union. On the menace of the Soviet Union, which we are seeing in this surge of authoritarianism and ethnic nationalism that's projected by Vladimir Putin. But the political potency is still the same. President Bush tries -- President Bush makes an argument that the Europeans can't get this free lunch. That America has got to start looking after itself. And even that -- and he's not the first president who thinks that there should be more of their defense spending dedicated toward NATO. And he has brought that issue to the fore, but he also creates false crises that he then claims to solve, while the underlying issue is the same, which is what is the commitment? That's the question the Europeans are asking, or maybe they started to just kind of wait for the time, when we're post-Trump to try to restore, you know, a world order. What happens in between is the critical question.</s>CAMEROTA: Margaret, we need to get to this next bit of nice, and that is that the Russian defense ministry put out an announcement that they are, I guess, excited about the new agreements, new military agreements between the U.S. and Russia.</s>TALEV: I bet you want to know what those agreements are.</s>AVLON: Surprise.</s>CAMEROTA: I am curious. And you were in Helsinki, and I'm just curious. Did President Trump mention any new agreements that happened in that tete-a-tete, one-on-one that he had with Vladimir Putin?</s>TALEV: We have not heard from President Trump or his team yet on what the Russians are talking about. We have a couple of potential clues from that news conference. And was the -- on the idea of election stuff, the idea of joint commission to look at, you know, whatever happened, and -- and -- or there could be some sort of discussion whether it's related to arms stuff, or whether it's related to military. There could be some discussion of information sharing, potentially, or some path toward an extension of arms control. But we just don't know. And given the complete reversal, and now semi undoing of the original reversal of the first position. There are a lot of questions about what actually happened in that one-on-one meeting with President Trump and President Putin. I do think it's safe to say, after yesterday's rush to the White House from Secretary Pompeo and some other top folks, and then the president's remarks in the afternoon, that there will be been a lot of resistance inside the administration, as well as in Congress, to forging any kind of a PAC with Russia at this point. But we still don't know what conversations actually were had between the president and Putin to prompt the Russians to put out this very provocative tease of a statement.</s>BERMAN: Good thing there's a record, a solid record --</s>CAMEROTA: Yes.</s>BERMAN: -- of that meeting.</s>GERGEN: But I do think this is the importance of congressional oversight. Everybody's saying, well, what is it that Congress can do? This is where Congress must force some understanding of two things. What happened, what potential agreement there is. What is the policy right now? What is the relationship with Russia? Where are we working together? Where are we working at cross purposes, and why is there such a schism between the president's national security team and him? But that's what plays itself out over and over again, and that's what's so dangerous.</s>BERMAN: All right, guys. Thanks so much for being with us. We're going to be talking about this all morning, no doubt about that. We're going to take one brief break for some really wonderful news. The survivors of that cave, those soccer kids who were trapped in there for so long, look at this picture.</s>CAMEROTA: Look at how much better they look.</s>BERMAN: They're going home from the hospital. We'll have a update -- this just happened -- next.