‘I’m genius’ says Trump as he tells his allies to up defence spending
‘I was extremely unhappy’
DONALD Trump said he was a ‘genius’ yesterday as he claimed he secured a huge rise in Nato spending by threatening to pull out.
He said he ‘fine-tuned’ the organisation and financial contributions from its 29 members were now ‘going up like a rocket ship’.
He had reportedly warned of ‘grave consequences’ and made threats that America may ‘go it alone’ if allies did not commit to scaling up spending.
His outburst threw the second day of the summit into disarray yesterday morning, forcing Nato secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, to reschedule one meeting and call an allies-only emergency session.
On the opening day of the meeting in Brussels, Mr Trump had demanded that Nato double the target for members’ defence spending, from 2% of each nation’s GDP to 4% .
Yesterday, when he asked if he could pull out without permission from Congress, he said: ‘I think I probably can, but that’s unnecessary and the people have stepped up today like they’ve never stepped up before.’ He said: ‘Some are at 2%, others agreed definitely 2% and some are going back to get the approval which they will get to go to 2%. After 2% we’ll start talking about going higher, but I said ultimately we should be years in advance, we should be at 4%.’
He said: ‘The US, depending on how you calculate it, was at 4.2%, and I said that’s unfair we have the largest GDP by far, our GDP has gone way up, which means we’re paying for even more which is very unfair.’ According to Nato’s latest estimates the US spends $686billion on defence – the largest of all members and more than 3.5% of GDP – compared to Germany’s $46billion, a little over 1%. Only five of the 29 members spend 2%: the US, Britain, Estonia, Greece and Poland.
Mr Stoltenberg gave a press conference yesterday, praising Mr Trump’s ‘strong leadership’ and said there was a ‘new sense of urgency’. In a post-summit press conference, Mr Trump said: ‘What has happened is, presidents over many years ... came in and said “do the best you can” and then left. Nobody did anything about it. We had a great meeting in terms of getting along... we have a great relationship, everybody in that room, by the time we left, got along and they agreed to pay more and they agreed to pay it more quickly.’
When asked if he would do a U-turn on Twitter later like he did at the G7 meeting last month, he said he would not be. ‘I’m a very stable genius,’ he said, adding: ‘Yesterday, I let them know I was extremely unhappy with what was happening and they have substantially upped their commitment and now we’re very happy and have a very powerful, strong Nato, much stronger than it was two days ago.’