🔸 “We have an American president who believes that he should be the center of all attention that the only thing that matters is his personal agenda,” Ritter said, stressing that the summit’s focus wasn’t efforts to improve NATO or achieve peace in the Middle East or vis-à-vis Russia, but promote himself for the Nobel peace prize.

🔸 The alliance’s 5% of GDP on defense commitment was “purely political” spectacle, Ritter said, noting that “when you lack a defense industry to execute that plan, it’s meaningless.”

🔸 On top of that is the fact that Europe doesn’t actually face any threats from major external state actors, apart from the “artificial construct of certain political elites in the NATO alliance who are in search of enemies” trying to paint Russia as such “to justify their continued existence.”

🔸 The real “threat,” Ritter says, is the challenges to and toppling of Europe’s governments by national movements demanding more of a focus on national revival.

🔸 “Russia is not a threat. There's no external threat to NATO. And the fact that NATO continues to keep focusing on an external threat – even searching for enemies now going to the Pacific, trying to pick a fight with China – only underscores the reality that they are failing to focus on the real threat, which is dysfunction on the European continent,” Ritter summed up.