President Donald Trump has corrected his error about NATO, making it clear in recent days that he does not regard it as “obsolete,” which was how he described it during the election campaign.

Instead he affirmed his commitment to that crucial alliance in Europe. He is also, as a corollary, right to call on European partners to pay their NATO contributions in full and on time.

The hyper-reactive criticism of President Trump’s reflexive opponents has been to exaggerate the importance of the fact that the president did not explicitly refer in his NATO speech to Article 5 of the alliance, the one in which members agree to treat an attack on one of them as an attack on all of them.

But what else could he mean by his words that America would “never forsake the friends that stood by our side”? This made it plain that America’s commitment to NATO isn’t conditional.

Read more at The Colorado Springs Gazette.