Montenegro has only been an independent nation again since 2006. (It had been independent previously between 1697 and the end of World War I, when it got folded into Yugoslavia.) It seems like a nice enough little place. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked it enough to make it one of the countries that decorated Jay Gatsby during The Great War.

I was promoted to be a major and every Allied government gave me decoration--even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!

And, back in parochial school, they made sure we knew all about Our Lady of the Rocks, Therefore, what it ever did to deserve this is beyond me. From The Atlantic:



At Trump’s first nato summit in 2017, he shoved aside Montenegro’s prime minister, Duško Marković, during the so-called family photo that brings together the leaders of the alliance’s member states in order to get a more prominent position in the picture. Then, in an interview broadcast Tuesday on Fox News, Trump called Montenegro, a country with roughly the same population as Vermont (about 620,000 people) and about the same geographic size as Connecticut, “a tiny country” with “very aggressive people…They may get aggressive, and, congratulations, you’re in World War III,” he said.

Trump was responding to a question from Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host who asked him why, in the event Montenegro were to be attacked, “ should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack?” Trump responded: “I understand what you’re saying. I’ve asked the same question.”

Yeah, and I’ll never stop blaming Ethiopia for starting World War II.

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The hell? This is a country with less than 700,000 people that nonetheless honored its NATO commitment and sent troops to Afghanistan in the wake of the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the only time that Article 5 of the NATO charter ever has been invoked. Now, somehow, because the President* of the United States knows nothing about anything, Montenegro is a foreign-policy problem that could spin this country into a cataclysm. And, on the electric Twitter machine, Jake Tapper of CNN points out that the Russian propaganda apparatus has been using Montenegro as a wedge on NATO—and on Montenegrin domestic politics—for a while now.

If you want to argue that NATO expansion was too ambitious and that it was conducted too hastily, that’s an interesting debate to have, particularly if that expansion was based on Russia’s being too hobbled to be bothered by it. But the expansion took place, and Montenegro is now as much of a member of NATO as France is, and that commitment managed to keep the peace through times much more perilous than these. Of course, the United States has never been led by an ignorant mucksavage before, so we’ll have to see.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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