Benni Schmidt Pedersen lives on a small farm in Denmark, where it’s quiet and he can hear if anyone is coming down the gravel road to his home. He’s stricken with PTSD from his time as a soldier in Afghanistan, where five members of his 130-person company died in the American-led war against the Taliban.
I called him today to read him a quote from President Trump about America’s NATO allies: “We’ve never needed them,” Trump said in a Fox News interview at the World Economic Forum, in Davos. “We have never really asked anything of them. You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan or this or that. And they did. They stayed a little back, little off the front lines.”
First Pedersen laughed. Then he tried to brush it off—classic Trump bluster. “Why doesn’t it surprise me that he’s saying that?”
Finally, his voice dropped an octave. “That’s bullshit,” he said.
It is, indeed, bullshit. The United States invoked Article 5, the mutual-defense clause of NATO’s founding charter, the day after the September 11 attacks. It remains the only time in NATO’s nearly 80-year history that the obligation of common defense has been activated. All 28 members of the alliance at the time sent soldiers to Afghanistan. Many never returned.
Consider these numbers:
An estimated 3,500 soldiers from NATO countries died in Afghanistan. The United States suffered the most losses in absolute terms: Nearly 2,500 U.S. service members were killed in the 20-year war. But per capita, Denmark suffered even more severe losses, burying 43 soldiers in a population, at the time, of about 5.5 million.
Other NATO members sacrificed, too. Britain lost about 450 soldiers, Canada more than 150. Other small countries, like Denmark, weren’t spared: Estonia lost nine soldiers. Norway, 10. Czech Republic, 14. Romania, 27.
Why does this matter now? Because Trump has been disparaging Europe’s contributions to NATO, and Denmark’s in particular, as he threatened to take over part of the Nordic country’s territory. Yesterday, he avoided doing what many feared he might. He told an audience in Davos that he wouldn’t use military force to acquire his coveted Greenland, which would have put an abrupt end to the alliance. But he made his disdain for NATO clear: “The United States is treated very unfairly by NATO. I want to tell you that. When you think about it, nobody can dispute it. We give so much, and we get so little in return.”
[Read: The sacrifice of the Danes]
That prompted a bit of fact-checking by NATO’s secretary-general, Mark Rutte. Privately, Rutte met with Trump and convinced him to accept a framework for negotiations that could see an enhanced U.S. military presence on Greenland as well as stepped-up NATO efforts in the broader Arctic region. Both are options that Denmark and other alliance members have been open to, and in fact encouraged, all along. In a public portion of their meeting, Rutte challenged Trump’s account of NATO’s steadfastness. “There is one thing I heard you say yesterday and today. You were not absolutely sure that the Europeans would come to the rescue of the U.S. if you will be attacked,” Rutte told Trump. “Let me tell you, they will. And they did in Afghanistan.”
Rutte continued: “For every two Americans who paid the ultimate price, there was one soldier from another NATO country who did not come back to his family.”
[Read: Davos Man may burn the whole thing down]
Trump, whose bone-spurs diagnosis in 1968 made him exempt from service in Vietnam, seems not to have taken kindly to the history lesson. So he offered his own, make-believe history of NATO activity in Afghanistan, in an interview with Fox’s Maria Bartiromo. The notion that soldiers from NATO allies “stayed a little back, little off the front lines” is false, Pedersen, the Danish veteran, told me. He deployed in 2010, the deadliest year for NATO forces, with some 700 fatalities. (Trump was hosting two seasons of his Apprentice TV series that year and toying publicly with a presidential bid.)
Pedersen’s company worked in Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan. Five of the company’s members were killed, including Sophia Bruun, the first female soldier to die in combat in Danish history, whose service I wrote about last week. Seventy-eight were injured, Pedersen said. They faced off with Taliban fighters nearly every other day.
“We were on the front lines, the same as the Americans,” he said. “That was our job.”
