TRUMP-NATO FACT CHECK

What Was Said

The United States is spending far more on NATO than any other Country. This is not fair, nor is it acceptable. While these countries have been increasing their contributions since I took office, they must do much more. Germany is at 1%, the U.S. is at 4%, and NATO benefits ...

… Europe far more than it does the U.S. By some accounts, the U.S. is paying for 90% of NATO, with many countries nowhere close to their 2% commitment. On top of this the European Union has a Trade Surplus of $151 Million with the U.S., with big Trade Barriers on U.S. goods. NO!

— President Donald Trump, on Twitter on Monday

The Facts

This is misleading.

As a candidate and as president, Trump has said that NATO member countries have failed to pay their debts to the organization. His claim misrepresents how NATO functions and conflates several different measures of the alliance’s military spending.

In May 2017, The Times’ Peter Baker examined similar claims the president made last year:

NATO has a budget to cover common civilian and military costs, and some NATOowned assets are also commonly funded when they are used in operations. The United States pays 22 percent of those costs, according to a formula based on national income. None of the NATO allies are in arrears on these contributions. Trump is referring imprecisely to a goal NATO has set for each member to spend at least 2 percent of its gross domestic product on its own defense each year. He is correct that only five of the 28 members currently meet that goal, and they are the United States, Greece, Britain, Estonia and Poland.

According to the most recent estimates from NATO, the United States spent $618 billion on its own defense last year after adjusting for inflation—or 3.57 percent of its GDP. That’s not quite 4 percent, as Trump said.

Collectively, defense spending by all NATO members in 2017 came to $917 billion. That means the United States’ spending represented 67 percent of the total.

It is true that the United States spends more than any other NATO member—both in total cost and as a percentage of GDP— on its own defense. It also contributes the most to NATO’s shared costs.

But all other nations pay their portion of the group bill.

In his Monday tweets, Trump also again exaggerated the U.S. trade deficit with the European Union by $50 billion. It is $101 billion.