Montenegro, formerly part of Yugoslavia before that country broke up in the early 1990s, finally became an independent state in 2006 and joined NATO in 2017. In a recent interview, Donald Trump was asked about the clause in the NATO treaty that requires that an attack on any member be treated as an attack on every member. The questioner asked him whether the US would go to war if Montenegro, with a population of just 630,000, was attacked.

My guess is that what initially went through Trump’s mind was “Montenegro? What the hell is Montenegro? Is it some kind of cocktail?” before figuring out from the question that it must be a small country in NATO and then riffing, in that mindless way of his, to cover his ignorance saying ““Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people … They’re very aggressive people. They may get aggressive, and congratulations, you’re in world war three.”

‘Very strong and aggressive people’? Where did that come from? Perhaps he thought from the ‘Negro’ in the name that it must be a nation of black people and so his racist mind immediately ascribed those qualities to them.

You may recall the time when at a meeting of NATO leaders last year, he rudely pushed aside the prime minister of Montenegro in order to get in the front and center of a group photograph of the leaders, so the ‘very strong and aggressive people’ of Montenegro are probably resigned to being disrespected by Trump.