Trump insists Germany not contributing its fair share to NATO

Washington — President Donald Trump insisted on Tuesday that Germany is not contributing “its fair share” to NATO , although he acknowledged that in general the member countries of the North Atlantic alliance are raising their payments.

“Germany honestly is not paying their fair share,” Trump said moments before meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg , who is in Washington to participate in the ministerial meeting of the alliance, which will take place on April 3-4.

“They’re not paying what they should be paying. They’re paying close to 1 percent,” said the US leader, referring to Germany.

At the earlier such meeting in Brussels on July 11-12, 2018,Trump had lambasted Germany for investing 1.23 percent of its GDP in its armed forces despite being the biggest European power and even said that the country was a “hostage” of Russia due to its bilateral energy agreements with Moscow.

Trump said last year that he wanted NATO nations to spend 4 percent of their GDP on defense, given that the US spends 4.3 of its GDP on NATO.

Trump said on Tuesday that the US was paying a large portion of NATO’s expenditures, which were devoted to defending Europe, a situation that he called “very unfair.”

The US leader has repeatedly criticized Washington’s allies saying that their defense expenditures are not high enough, a situation that could darken the mood at the Washington meeting, at which the foreign ministers of the 29 NATO member nations are scheduled to participate.

Trump was more conciliatory in saying that the rest of the alliance’s partners are doing better in terms of paying more for defense costs.

“We’ve worked together in getting some of our allies to pay their fair share. It’s called burden sharing,” Trump said, adding that “tremendous progress” had been made and the US relationship with NATO was good and his relationship with Stoltenberg is “outstanding.”

According to the report that NATO published on March 14, the European allies increased their military spending in 2018 by 5.19 percent over the previous year, but just seven countries were spending more than 2 percent of their GDPs on defense: the US, the UK, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Greece and Estonia.

Trump said that 15 years ago, the defense spending situation was bad, and “When I came (into office), it wasn’t so good,” but now “it’s a rocket ship up. We’ve picked up over $140 billion in additional money, and we look like we’re going to have at least another $100 billion in spending by the nations ... by 2020.”

When asked about the alliance’s relations with Russia, which is anticipated to be one of the main issues to be discussed at the ministerial meeting, Trump also downplayed his harsh tone, saying that “I hope we have a good relationship with Russia. I think we’ll get along” adding that he wants to have a good relationship with China, too.