Obama meets with NATO leader
2 stress importance of alliance as they talk Brussels, refugees
Bloomberg News
Washington — President Barack Obama sat side-by-side with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in the Oval Office on Monday, offering a symbolic rebuke to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has questioned whether there’s still a need for the defense alliance.
Obama and Stoltenberg met to discuss last month’s terrorist attacks in Brussels near NATO headquarters, the surge of refugees driven from Syria and Iraq by the Islamic State and the alliance’s summit in Warsaw in July. The political backdrop, though, is November’s election, in which Trump has emerged as the Republican front-runner while questioning U.S. alliances including NATO.
“NATO continues to be a linchpin, a cornerstone of our collective defense and U.S. security policy,” Obama said after the meeting. The alliance “is as important as ever,” Stoltenberg said.
Terrorists killed at least 31 people in Brussels in bombings on March 22. Islamic State claimed credit for the attack. “Terrorism affects everyone from Brussels to San Bernardino,” Stoltenberg added.
Trump has called NATO “obsolete” and said the U.S. pays “far too much” for the alliance, which includes former Soviet republics that count on its support against Russia. Obama said those nations enjoy “reassurances not just in words” that the alliance would back them, and that NATO is helping Ukraine, a nonmember, improve its defensive capabilities even as it negotiates with Russia to end conflict in the country’s east.
Neither Obama nor Stoltenberg mentioned Trump or the presidential campaign, and they declined to answer reporters’ questions about him.
Obama has stood by the U.S. commitment to the alliance while expressing frustration that most other NATO members don’t meet a goal that they spend at least 2% of gross domestic product on defense. In an interview published last month in The Atlantic magazine, Obama called such countries “free riders.”
NATO, in a report released in June, estimated that five of the alliance’s 28 members — the U.S., Poland, the U.K., Greece and Estonia — would meet the 2% threshold in 2015.
Obama said he and Stoltenberg discussed “generally what’s been happening in the southern (region) of NATO” as hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Middle East and Africa have attempted to enter Europe in recent years, driven by conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Libya. The alliance will work with the European Union “to help prevent the tragedy we saw last summer,” Obama said, when thousands of migrants drowned attempting to cross the Mediterranean and Aegean seas.