NATO to lower U.S. financial obligations for alliance

BRUSSELS — In another gesture to President Donald Trump, NATO announced Thursday that it had agreed to reduce the United States’ contribution to the alliance’s relatively small central budget, a move aimed at ensuring a calm leaders’ meeting next week in London.

The military alliance’s own budget, which covers its headquarters and staff and some small joint military operations, is about $2.5 billion a year, compared with more than $700 billion for the Pentagon.

At a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris, the alliance’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, said its members had agreed to redistribute some costs.

“The U.S. will pay less, Germany will pay more, so now the U.S. and Germany will pay the same,” he said, with each contributing about 16% of NATO’s central budget. Previously, the U.S. paid about 22%.

The changes become effective in 2021, according to a NATO diplomat.

The NATO budget is separate from the 2% of gross domestic product that each NATO member has agreed as their goal for defense spending by 2024.

Mr. Trump regularly complains about defense spending by other NATO members, but other countries in the alliance have increased their spending since the Russian annexation of Crimea five years ago by about $130 billion, a NATO diplomat said.

Even so, only eight of the 29 member countries meet the 2% goal.

NATO leaders are trying to keep Mr. Trump from

disrupting this meeting, a short one to celebrate the alliance’s 70th anniversary, as he did the last Brussels summit meeting in July 2018. Mr. Stoltenberg in particular has tried to keep close ties to the Trump administration, given the importance of the American commitment to NATO.

Some Trump officials, such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, are embracing the alliance amid a renewed Russian threat. On Thursday, during an official visit to Germany to mark the anniversary of reunification, Mr. Pompeo said, “NATO remains an important, critical, perhaps historically one of the most critical, strategic partnerships in all of recorded history.”

Still, during an interview published Thursday in The Economist, Mr. Macron blew a loud raspberry at the military alliance, declaring that Mr. Trump’s presidency has inflicted “brain death” upon it.

European leaders dismissed Mr. Macron’s remarks. German Chancellor Angela Merkel frostily remarked Thursday, “This view does not correspond to mine,” while Mr. Stoltenberg described Germany as being “at the heart of NATO.”

At a news conference with Mr. Stoltenberg after their meeting in Paris, Mr. Macron defended his own criticism about NATO. He said he was particularly irked that Mr. Trump had told President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey that he would pull American troops out of Syria without having spoken to other NATO members.

“A wake-up call was necessary,” Mr. Macron insisted after much criticism of his language. “I’m glad it was delivered, and I’m glad everyone now thinks we should rather think about our strategic goals.”

Too much emphasis was put on military spending, Mr. Macron added, and not enough on strategy. France, a nuclear power, is among the NATO members not meeting the alliance’s target for military spending.

Meanwhile, after decades of inhibitions about the prospect of rearmament, Germany is starting to up its military game.

Its defense minister, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who is seeking to cement her bona fides to replace Ms. Merkel as chancellor, delivered a major speech at the Bundeswehr University in Munich on Thursday declaring that Germany should participate militarily in Asia to help contain China and that it should become the third-biggest spender on defense (behind China and the U.S.) by 2031.