Well this was interesting.
BBC emailed me on Friday and asked me to be on World News, then cancelled about an hour before the show. No big deal — stories get bumped all the time. I figured I was going to be on to discuss Donald Trump’s negotiation skills and limitations, as I had on NPR, PBS, and MSNBC, and perhaps some thought’s I’d published about Trump’s trip to England and his comments on Brexit.
In fact, that’s what was planned. I even had a nice email exchange with the producer about Brexit and NATO. This is what I wrote to her about NATO:
While there is agreement that European nations could add to their defense spending, (a) misrepresenting the total US spend (the Pentagon says 3.3%, not 4.3%), (b) not recognizing that the US defense spending, for the world's remaining superpower, covers far more than NATO's obligations, and (c) looking only at the binary spend-too-much/spend-too-little leaves out other benefits to NATO, addressing an incredibly integrated world into a simplistic distributive model, and in the long run will reduce the power and effectiveness of the US in the world. The US loses credibility, loses the first, last, and loudest voice at the table that comes with the biggest budget, loses the ability to project power around the world, and loses the leadership that brought us together after WWII and through the Cold War.
So that’s what I fully expected to talk about during the 3:00PM Eastern BBC World News.
And then Trump held his press conference with Putin.
And this is what happened: