The criticism by two former presidents of President Trump's re-examination of NATO, insisting allies pay their fair share, is ironic, says author and filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza.
"An accounting, a re-examination is long overdue," said D'Souza in an interview with the Fox News Channel's Laura Ingraham regarding comments by former President George W. Bush and former President Bill Clinton last Thursday at a forum at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas.
"It took an outsider like Trump to do it," D'Souza said of Trump's efforts to reform NATO.
"And to watch these old geezers complain about it. These guys have been like toy soldiers who walk into the wall and keep going," D'Souza said of Bush and Clinton.
"The examination was overdue in their time, and it's happening, finally, now," he said.
Bush inferred that the U.S. wasn't taking its proper leadership role, saying, "The truth of the matter is the way that the world is today, that if the U.S. takes the lead, others tend to follow."
Clinton said: "Do you really want to say, 'We're going to make sure everybody has a big military, but we're not going to help anybody build their own future and change their own lives?' I don't think so."
D'Souza commented that the "very fact that two guys that ran against each other from opposite parties can come together like this shows how Trump has changed the political cartography, the whole map of international relations now."
The re-examination of NATO, he said, should have been done in 1992 when the Soviet Union collapsed, because the purpose of the alliance was to defend the West against communism.
Another premise for NATO, D'Souza pointed out, goes back to World War II, when the U.S. and its allies decided to pay for the defense of Germany to prevent it from militarizing as it did in the Nazi era.
D'Souza's new film, "Death of a Nation," which argues President Trump is facing the kind of fierce opposition President Abraham Lincoln faced at another time of sharp division, debuts Aug. 3 in theaters nationwide.
See the trailer for D'Souza's upcoming film: