Professor Monshipouri: Trump's Foreign Policy to Redefine Friends, Adversaries

TEHRAN TIMES -- Mahmood Monshipouri teaches Middle Eastern politics at San Francisco State University and University of California, Berkeley. He is the editor of “Inside the Islamic Republic: Social Change in Post-Khomeini Iran” (Oxford University Press, 2016). He wrote an opinion piece on how the Trump presidency will affect U.S. foreign policy. “Europe’s broader concern with President-elect Donald J. Trump has intensified as the latter has suggested that the United States would not steadfastly defend NATO members from a possible attack by Russia if they had not contributed their fair share to the alliance — which is estimated to be roughly around 2 percent of each member’s GDP. This new much more transactional view of alliances contradicts the very language of the Article 5 of the defense pact (known as mutual defense clause), which reads, ‘An armed attack against one ... shall be considered an attack against them all.’ Trump has gone as far as calling NATO ‘obsolete,’ a comment that has sent a shiver up and down of the collective spines of many EU leaders.”