President Donald J. Trump is again calling on members of the NATO military alliance to pay more money into their own defense budgets. This comes as President Trump receives NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte at the White House, continuing ongoing discussions about military commitments within the alliance.
Trump has persistently urged NATO members to meet the agreed benchmark of spending two percent of GDP on defense. He has previously remarked that the United States might not fulfill its defense obligations under NATO to those members who fail to meet their obligations, despite NATO’s founding treaty mandating collective defense in the event of an attack against a member state.
During Trump’s first term as president, many NATO members were well under the agreed benchmark of two percent of GDP for defense spending, with only a handful of countries, such as Poland, managing to meet the target. Meanwhile, particularly “delinquent” countries such as Germany were enriching the Russian state by striking energy deals with it.
Since his inauguration in January, President Trump has already persuaded some NATO allies, including Lithuania and Estonia, to pledge to spend as much as five percent of GDP on defense. The increase would mean the two Baltic nations will spend more than Poland, which currently spends four percent of GDP.
Trump spelled out his goal while speaking to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in January, saying, “I’m also going to ask all NATO nations to increase defense spending to five percent of GDP, which is what it should have been years ago.”
