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Eight years after Donald Trump used his first appearance at a NATO leaders summit to castigate members of the alliance for “not paying what they should be paying” for their own defense needs, the 32-member bloc is pledging to more than double their military budgeting commitments — and the American president is getting credit.
Speaking at the outset of the group’s annual confab at The Hague, Secretary General Mark Rutte said the alliance was poised to take “historic, transformational decisions to make our people safer, through a stronger, fairer and more lethal NATO” by implementing a “concrete plan” for each member of the alliance to spend a full five percent of gross domestic product on defense, through a combination of “core defense” and “defense and security-related investments.”
Rutte, a former Dutch prime minister who was selected as NATO’s chief civil servant and diplomat last year, said the move was “required” to make the alliance “fairer” by ensuring that each member “contributes their fair share for security” as he echoed a complaint voiced by Trump during his first summit in 2017, when the American leader groused that members’ failure to meet a two percent defense spending threshold was “not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States.”
“For too long, one ally, the United States carried too much of the burden of that commitment, and that changes today,” Rutte added.
The NATO leader then began praising Trump in a section of his remarks that evoked the statements of adulation that are heard at the American leader’s cabinet meetings, addressing him first as “President Trump,” then as “dear Donald” before saying it was Trump who “made this change possible.”
“Your leadership on this has already produced $1 trillion in extra spending from European allies since 2016 and the decisions today will produce trillions more for our common defense to make us stronger and fairer by equalizing spending between America and America's allies,” he said.
He added that NATO members would also agree to “further increase defense production” with what he described as “a huge expansion of our defense industrial base on both sides of the Atlantic,” calling the development “good for our security” as well as “good for our economies and good for our jobs.”
Rutte’s remarks echoed a text message he’d sent to Trump the day before — which the president had captured in a screen grab he then posted to social media — in which he congratulated Trump for “decisive action” in ordering airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites over the weekend and hailed him as “flying into another big success in The Hague” on account of the agreement for NATO members to up their defense spending to five percent of GDP.
“You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done. Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win,” he said.
When the 32 heads of state and government representing each of the allies met on Wednesday, they agreed to ratify the five percent threshold, writing in a joint declaration that each nation would commit to that minimum expenditure “annually on core defense requirements as well as defense-and security-related spending by 2035 to ensure our individual and collective obligations.”
Of that amount, 3.5 percent of each country’s GDP will go to “resource core defense requirements” with the remaining 1.5 percent allocated for “critical infrastructure” protection as well as “civil preparedness and resilience” and strengthening countries’ defense industrial bases.
Each country will be required to submit annual plans to show “a credible, incremental path” to reaching the five percent spending threshold, the declaration said.
In what appeared to be another carrot aimed at garnering the president’s support, the NATO leaders also stated a commitment to “eliminate defense trade barriers” and “promote defense industrial cooperation” by leveraging transatlantic partnerships, as well as as an agreement to reaffirm “enduring sovereign commitments to provide support to Ukraine” including “direct contributions towards Ukraine’s defense and its defense industry” that can be counted towards the five percent of GDP require for defense spending.
The NATO leaders’ agreement to step up their defense spending comes after years of pressure from Trump, including both implicit and explicit threats to the alliance’s mutual defense provisions, raising fears that the American leader would either pull the United States out of the alliance entirely or simply refuse to come to another nation’s aid in the event of an attack.
Former officials who served in Trump’s first administration have said that he expressed a desire to exit the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty, which he has long described as something akin to a mafia protection racket or a country club in which member states pay “dues” in exchange for American military protection.
During last year’s presidential campaign, Trump went so far as to say that he’d “encourage” Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally if that country were “delinquent” on defense spending, prompting Rutte’s predecessor, Jens Stoltenberg, to state that a suggestion that "allies will not defend each other undermines all of our security."
His remarks on the campaign trail were part of a pattern set during his first appearance at a NATO summit in 2017, when he claimed “many” allies owed “massive amounts of money from past years and not paying in those past years,” which he continued as recently as Tuesday, when he refused to state whether he would commit the United States to continued support of the mutual defense provision in the NATO treaty that saw America’s allies come to her aid after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington.
Asked if he was still committed to Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty, which states that an attack against one member is considered an attack against all of the organization’s 32 member nations while en route to The Netherlands aboard Air Force One, Trump declined to say, telling reporters: “It depends on your definition. There's numerous definitions of Article Five. You know that, right?”
The president added that he was nonetheless “committed to being ... friends” with the other members of the alliance because he had “become friends with many of those leaders” and was “committed to helping them.”
When pressed to explain his comments and given another chance to voice support for mutual defense, he told reporters he was “committed to saving lives” and “committed to live and safety” while promising to give his “exact definition” of Article Five once he arrived in The Hague rather than doing so “on the back of an airplane.”
And as he sat next to Rutte during a brief media availability Wednesday morning, Trump appeared to have found more favorable feelings towards Article Five when he was asked once more about his support for the mutual aid provision.
“We’re with them all the way,” he said.
Asked to clarify his stance during a later bilateral meeting alongside Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof, Trump replied: “I stand with it.”
“That's why I'm here. If I didn't stand with it, I wouldn't be here,” he said.
