Trump attacks Montenegro, "a small country with very aggressive people"

One controversy follows another. While still trying to get out of the outcry related to his attitude considered conciliatory vis-à-vis Vladimir Putin, on which he has painfully retropedal, Donald Trump has attracted a new scandal Wednesday, by making strange remarks about the Montenegro this small Balkan country stuck between Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and Albania, which has a little less than 700,000 inhabitants.

"Very aggressive people"

In an interview with the US channel Fox News the President of the United States was questioned by journalist Tucker Carlson about the article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty on the principle of collective defense, one of the pillars of NATO. This principle consists in considering an attack on a member state of the Alliance as an attack directed against all allies, and commits them to protect each other.

"If, for example, Montenegro is attacked, why my should his son go to Montenegro to defend them? "asked Fox News reporter Donald Trump. The latter then gave him an answer without half measure.

"I understand what you are saying, I asked the same question: Montenegro is a very small country with very strong people, very aggressive," said Donald Trump, before suggesting that this aggression could trigger "The Third World War" if the other members of the Atlantic Alliance were to come to defend him.

Towards a new outcry?

Very strong remarks, which risk triggering a new controversy around the American president, already very criticized for his attitude towards Vladimir Putin on Monday in Helsinki, Finland

"By attacking Montenegro and questioning our obligations within NATO, the president is doing exactly the game of Putin", lamented on Twitter Republican Senator John McCain. "The people of Montenegro have bravely resisted pressure from Putin's Russia to join democracy" and "the Senate voted 97 to 2 in support of its entry into NATO," said the elected representative.

For its part, the Government of Montenegro officially responded to Donald Trump this Thursday, through a statement released in Montenegrin and English, in which he says contribute "to peace and stability, not only on the European continent but around the world." Montenegro recalls that it also does so "alongside American soldiers in Afghanistan".

"In the contemporary world, it does not matter whether you are big or small, what counts is the level at which you defend the values ​​of freedom, solidarity and democracy."

Why Trump is it attacking Montenegro?

At the last NATO summit in early July, the US president violently seized his European allies to increase their spending military, with a lot of messages on Twitter and unkind statements to the address of bad payers. So much so that an extraordinary meeting was held urgently during this particularly tense summit in order to avoid a major crisis.

But Montenegro, a former Yugoslav republic that gained independence from Serbia in June 2006, entered NATO only very recently, in June 2017, becoming the 29th member of the Alliance. In fact, its defense spending is very low, making it a prime target for the US president, who keeps asking Europeans to increase their military spending and deplores the fact that the United States pays for all.

Moreover, this integration of Montenegro into NATO had angered Moscow, which had at the time denounced a "provocation". Violence from the pro-Russian opposition had rocked Montenegro in 2015 to protest the rally. The current president of the country, Milo Djukanovic, at the time Prime Minister, had indeed met the very strong hostility of a part of the population, and had escaped an attempt of badbadination, which local justice attributed to pro-Russian militants.

For the Montenegrin political badyst Sergej Sekulovic, quoted by AFP, if these statements of Trump do not represent "support to anyone", they fit "in a context of need to relax the relations between the States United States and Russia, "this week.