By David Stockman - April 11, 2025

The ascension to NATO of the Balkan Five (Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania) and the Baltic Three (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) amounts to some kind of bad joke. Their combined active military forces total just 66,000 servicemen, which is exactly equal to the combined 66,000 man police forces of New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia.

Likewise, their combined defense budgets are $8 billion annually or about the level of Pentagon spending every seven hours, including weekends, holidays, snow days and the Fourth of July parades, military bands and all. And when it comes to economic heft, their collective GDP is a diminutive $350 billion or just 1.3% of that of the USA.

So we rightly asked, why bother? Their military manpower, token defense budgets and rounding error GDPs do not have even remote relevance to standing up America’s triad strategic nuclear deterrent, which doesn’t require any foreign bases or allies in any case. Nor do they contribute a whit to an invincible conventional military Fortress America defense of the airspace and shorelines of the US homeland way over here on the far side of the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean moats.

And yet and yet. The wee countries of Eastern European NATO actually have some modest throw-weight compared to what’s involved in the raging Yemen bombing leak controversy at the top of today’s the news. Of course, the controversy is all about the leak of what practically amounts to a scheduled bombing run against a tiny spec of an “enemy” on the Red Sea coast. But the far more important question is why in the hell was the Donald bombing the bedraggled Houthi installations in the first place?

Or as Ann Coulter expressed it more colorfully:

…because right now, his foreign policy team is looking like John Bolton without the ridiculous Wilford Brimley mustache. Since Trump keeps hiring these people, it’s a good time to remind him that, in 2016, he won more primary votes than any Republican in U.S. history (as well as the election) by saying things like this about a war that had a million more justifications than his recent bombing of the Houthis:

“Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. … We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives … George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.”

So why does Trump keep surrounding himself with tinhorn cowboys who think it’s America’s responsibility to drone, bomb, invade and occupy other countries whenever and for whatever reason they want?

As it happens, the Houthi tribes– who profess a variant of Shiite Islam—have dominated much of northern and western Yemen for centuries. They generally ruled North Yemen during the long expanse after it was established in 1918 until the two Yemen’s were reunified in 1990.

So when a Washington installed government in Sana’a was overthrown and the uneasily unified nation of Yemen disintegrated into warring religious factions, the Houthi took power in northern Yemen, while Sunni tribes aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda held sway in the south. And these latter folks are far worse on the terrorist scale than the Houthi ever dreamed of being.

Needless to say . . .

[SNIP]