Donald Trump has spent years struggling to understand one of the basic tenets of the NATO alliance. It’s not complicated, and he’s been presented with the truth many times, but on countless occasions, he’s flubbed the issue anyway.
NATO’s member nations are expected to spend at least 2% of GDP on their military budgets. For years, Democratic and Republican administrations have chided countries that have fallen short of the benchmark, though the Obama and Biden administrations had success in pushing allies toward the goal.
Trump has repeatedly expressed confusion about this, arguing that assorted NATO members are “delinquent“ — in effect, treating military spending as dues — which has never really made any sense.
It’s against this backdrop that the newly inaugurated Republican president, on the fourth day of his second term, made a video appearance at the World Economic Forum. And while much of the speech criticized our European allies, the powerful audience in Davos, Switzerland, also heard Trump make some new comments about NATO. From the transcript:
[A]s we restore common sense in America, we’re moving quickly to bring back strength and peace and stability abroad. I’m also going to ask all NATO nations to increase defense spending to 5 percent of GDP, which is what it should have been years ago — it was only at 2 percent, and most nations didn’t pay until I came along; I insisted that they pay, and they did — because the United States was really paying the difference at that time, and it’s — it was unfair to the United States. But many, many things have been unfair for many years to the United States.
While most of the details in this excerpt were nonsensical, what mattered was the top-line declaration: Trump wants to up the military spending threshold from 2% of GDP to 5%.
It’s difficult to say whether the president understands the implications of his comments, but there’s simply no realistic way NATO members will go along with this. Indeed, even the U.S. isn’t prepared to go along with this: As The New York Times’ Peter Baker noted, “The U.S. currently spends about 3% of its GDP on military, so to meet Trump’s target, America would have to increase its defense budget by $567 billion a year.”
Note, we’re not talking about spending $567 billion a year on the military, we’re talking about spending an additional $567 billion a year on the military, on top of our already enormous Pentagon budget — even as Republicans in the White House and on Capitol Hill talk about the need for spending cuts.
A few hours later, Trump spoke briefly to reporters in the Oval Office and shared some additional thoughts on NATO. “We’re protecting them,” the president said, referring to NATO allies. “They’re not protecting us. We’re protecting them, so I don’t think we should be spending, I’m not sure we should be spending anything.”
He then reiterated his call for moving the military spending benchmark from 2% to 5%.
Against this backdrop, Trump also recently made veiled threats toward a NATO ally, which came on the heels of a campaign season in which the Republican was also critical of alliance members.
And did I mention that the president, during his first term, reportedly expressed an interest in abandoning NATO altogether? Because that seems relevant, too.
Maybe nothing will come of all of this and Trump’s Davos rhetoric represented little more than wishful thinking. But John Bolton, Trump’s former White House national security advisor, has repeatedly warned the public that his former boss might withdraw the U.S. from the alliance, and now seems like an excellent time to take those warning seriously.