Donald Trump’s tirades weaken NATO and please Vladimir Putin (Source usatoday.com)

As NATO leaders gathered in Brussels this week to be severely lectured by America’s mercurial president — who gets some things right about the organization, but a whole lot else wrong — it’s worth recalling what the alliance represents. First and foremost, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is the largest and most successful assemblage of allies in history, projecting strength from a single, elegant premise: that an attack on one member is an attack on all.

Created from the ashes of World War II as a way to end European wars and serve as a bulwark against a menacing Soviet Union, the original 12-member alliance worked even better than imagined.

For about seven decades, Europe prospered in relative peace. The Soviet Union collapsed. And as NATO grew — to 29 nations, with each new entrant committed to democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law — freedom flourished.

That’s not just good for Europe. It’s also good for the U.S. America no longer rushes troops overseas to die on European battlefields every generation, and the European Union is now our largest trading partner. As Defense Secretary James Mattis put it during his Senate confirmation: “If we did not have NATO today, we would need to create it.”

Someone needs to tell that to Mattis’ boss, President Donald Trump. Despite Trump’s relentless carping about burden-sharing, the alliance has invoked its collective-defense provision just once in almost 70 years: to defend America after 9/11. NATO forces, fighting alongside U.S. troops in Afghanistan, paid their commitment in blood, suffering a thousand battlefield deaths in the years since.

Bipartisan support for NATO is so strong that a Senate resolution supporting the alliance passed 97-2 on Tuesday.