President Donald Trump caught a lot of flack from media when early onion his tenure, he insisted that NATO members should pay their own way, that the U.S. shouldn’t always have to be carrying the organization when other countries weren’t paying into it according to what they had agreed.

Media called his criticisms an attack on NATO and tried to link it to their Trump-Russia collusion narrative.

But as the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, later noted, Trump’s tough talk forced other countries to come across and at least up their contributions, thus, in his words, making NATO stronger. He praised Trump’s efforts to get everyone to pay their own way.

From USA Today:

President Donald Trump “is committed to NATO” and deserves credit in obtaining $100 billion more in defense spending for the alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, said Sunday.

“President Trump has been very clear: He is committed to NATO. He stated that clearly just a few days ago and also at the NATO summit in July,” Stoltenberg said on “Fox News Sunday.”

That’s thinking like a Republican and a business person.

Now, let’s compare that with thinking like a Democrat and believing there’s an endless pot of money from which you can plumb.

Let’s look at the news today that the U.N. may run out of money by the end of the month.

From Yahoo:

The United Nations is running a deficit of $230 million, Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Monday, and may run out of money by the end of October.

In a letter intended for the 37,000 employees at the UN secretariat and obtained by AFP, Guterres said unspecified “additional stop-gap measures” would have to be taken to ensure salaries and entitlements are paid.

“Member States have paid only 70 per cent of the total amount needed for our regular budget operations in 2019. This translates into a cash shortage of $230 million at the end of September. We run the risk of depleting our backup liquidity reserves by the end of the month,” he wrote.

Their response to being $230 million in the red? Maybe now we should cut down on expenses and restrict travel to “only essential activities.” So they were traveling for “non-essential activities” while they were continuing to rack up that deficit?

And unlike Trump, when member states refused to come across with the money they were obligated to pay, the U.N. simply let the members get away with it.

Of course, it’s always been the U.S. who has contributed the most, despite being the state who needs the U.N. the least. The U.S. pays 22 percent of their operating budget which is about $5.4 billion. It’s been the U.S. whose provided them a safe haven here.

Meanwhile their leadership has been staunchly anti-American for years.

The only president who has seemed to care about that, at least recently, has been Trump who has held their feet to the fire and tried to condition aid, and whose last ambassador, Nikki Haley, stood up to their frequent anti-American moves.

If they go under, one has to wonder what would be lost and how that would change the landscape.