Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Trump scolds NATO allies for dodging military costs
At celebration of unity, says others need to ante up
In a meeting of foreign ministers, the president also stops short of reaffirming the alliance’s mutual defense pledge.
BRUSSELS — President Donald Trump directly rebuked NATO allies for not paying their fair share of military costs, as they stood stone-faced nearby, and he stopped short of reaffirming the alliance’s mutual defense pledge as the foreign leaders met Thursday for a celebration of unity.
The unusually pointed remarks at the dedication of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s gleaming new headquarters showed the limits of Trump’s recent warming to the nearly 70year-old organization, which, as a candidate, he lambasted as obsolete.
Compounding the awkwardness, Trump spoke beside a newly installed relic of the World Trade Center towers downed on Sept. 11, 2001. The twisted steel commemorated the one and only time that NATO invoked its mutual defense pledge, Article 5 of its founding charter — in defense of the United States.
Candidate Trump’s skepticism about America’s key international alliances seemed to have lessened by the time he arrived Wednesday in Brussels, the seat of the European Union and NATO’s headquarters. Last month, Trump declared that NATO was no longer obsolete.
But by his remarks Thursday, the “America first” president reprised his core critique about what he called allies’ “chronic underpayments” and did so face to face with his counterparts in NATO. Several looked disgusted, and some exchanged glances and whispers.
Trump noted that the United States has spent more on defense in eight years than the other 27 member countries combined and that 23 of the countries still don’t meet a NATO target of spending 2 percent of their respective nations’ economic output on defense.
“This is not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States,” Trump said. “Many of these nations owe massive amounts of money from past years.”
“We have to make up for the many years lost,” he added.
NATO members had hoped that Trump would explicitly endorse Article 5, but he did not. He did, however, note that after Sept. 11, “our NATO allies responded swiftly and decisively, invoking for the first time in its history the Article 5 collective defense commitments.”
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg played down the omission. Trump “sent a strong signal” by speaking at the commemoration, Stoltenberg said.
“We have heard President Trump before being very blunt on the message of fair burden sharing,” he said after the leaders’ working dinner. “Several allies expressed that we have to invest in defense not just to please the United States. We have to invest in defense also because it is in our interest to do so.”
Separately, NATO members agreed to formally join the U.S.-led coalition battling the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, as the administration wanted. The move is mostly symbolic, however, since NATO members already are in the coalition as individual states, and NATO is not being asked to take a combat role but will provide tactical support.
Trump’s lecture on NATO nations’ defense spending came at the moment intended to call attention to the time the alliance came to the aid of the United States in Afghanistan, where more than 1,000 non-American NATO personnel died. The steel from the World Trade Center’s North Tower is called the “Article V artifact,” symbolizing the NATO provision that says an attack on any one member would be considered an attack on all.
Also unveiled, by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, was a section of the Berlin Wall intended to evoke the founding purpose of NATO as a check on the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
“It is not isolation or the building of walls that will make us successful, but the sharing of values,” Merkel said, bringing to mind Trump’s promised wall on the U.S.-Mexico border as much as the long-fallen Berlin Wall.
Just hours earlier in Berlin, Merkel sat side-byside with former President Barack Obama, with whom she enjoyed a close partnership.
At NATO’s 2014 summit in Wales, the alliance agreed, at the Obama administration’s urging, to gradually increase military spending. But Trump suggested in his remarks that the obligation has new resonance given threats of international terrorist networks “as well as threats from Russia” in Eastern Europe.
Most nations spend 1.2 percent to 1.6 percent of their GDP on defense, said Jeffrey Rathke, deputy director of the Europe program for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But in recent years Canada and European nations spent an additional $10 billion to address the gap. By year’s end eight of the 28 current NATO nations will be at 2 percent, while almost all others will be inching toward it.
Trump also met with EU leaders in Brussels. Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, said differences remain between the Trump administration and the EU on Russia, energy and trade. “I am not 100 percent sure that we can say today … that we have a common opinion about Russia,” Tusk, a former Polish prime minister, said after a meeting with Trump at EU headquarters.