Minister plays down Trump’s Nato threat, arguing US alliance strong enough to ‘outlast’ current issues – UK politics live

Pat McFadden says Trump running a ‘transactional presidency’ and that ‘our job is to navigate this’Here is Peter Walker’s story on what Pat McFadden has been saying this morning in response to Donald Trump’s implict threat to withdraw support for Nato if countries like the UK don’t help the US in the Gulf.Here are some more quotes from Donald Trump’s interview with Edward Luce from the Financial Times. Trump implicitly threatened to withdraw support for Nato if countries like the UK did not supply warships to protect oil tankers going through the strait of Hormuz from attacks by the Iranians. (See 8.57am.) But he made other points too.Trump argued that European Nato countries should help the US in the Gulf in return for the help the US has offered Ukraine. He said:We have a thing called Nato. We’ve been very sweet. We didn’t have to help them with Ukraine. Ukraine is thousands of miles away from us . . . But we helped them. Now we’ll see if they help us.He also argued that he could not be confident that other Nato members would support the US in an emergency.Because I’ve long said that we’ll be there for them but they won’t be there for us. And I’m not sure that they’d be there.He said that Nato counties should send minesweepers to the strait of Hormuz. (Europe has “many more” of them than the US, the FT says.)He also implied he would like Nato countries to send military units who could “knock out some bad actors that are along the [Iranian] shore”.He accepted that, with limited resources, Iran could have a disproportionate impact.We’re hitting them very hard. They’ve got nothing left but to make a little trouble in the strait but these people are beneficiaries and they ought to help us police it. We’ll help them. But they should also be there. You sort of need a lot of people to watch over a few. Continue reading...