President Donald Trump sent sharply worded letters to several NATO nations demanding they step up spending for their military defenses ahead of next week’s summit with the US allies in Brussels, according to reports.
The letters sent in June relayed the administration’s annoyance that the NATO members have fallen short on paying for their shared defense and threatened to shift the US military presence in Europe if they do not begin to pony up more money, the New York Times reported.
“As we discussed during your visit in April, there is growing frustration in the United States that some allies have not stepped up as promised,” Trump wrote to German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a letter obtained by the newspaper. “The United States continues to devote more resources to the defense of Europe when the Continent’s economy, including Germany’s, are doing well and security challenges abound. This is no longer sustainable for us.”
In a letter sent to Britain, Defense Secretary James Mattis acknowledged that the country is meeting its 2 percent target for defense spending, but said that wasn’t good enough.
Britain’s global role “will require a level of defense spending beyond what we would expect from allies with only regional interests,” Mattis wrote, according to Reuters.
He also asked for a “clear and fully funded, forward defense blueprint” from Britain and expected to be updated at the NATO gathering next Wednesday and Thursday.
The letters — sent also to Belgium, Norway and Canada — argue that they are not living up to a commitment the countries made during a 2014 summit in Wales to spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense by 2024.
The Trump administration was already considering scaling back the US military presence in Germany, where about 35,000 active-duty troops are stationed, as the president groused about the cost of keeping them there, the Washington Post reported last month.
Relations between Washington and its allies are already on shaky ground after Trump said that “NATO is as bad as NAFTA” during a meeting of the G-7 nations last month in Quebec, and because of the tit-for-tat trade tariffs between the US and European Union.
Belgium Prime Minister Charles Michel said, “I am not very impressed by this type of letter,” during a European Union meeting last Friday.
Norwegian Defense Minister Frank Bakke-Jensen said shared defense spending will be a key topic of next week’s summit.
By the beginning of this year, eight of the 29 NATO members had either met or were close to meeting the 2 percent mark, six others revealed plans to reach that goal by 2024 and two others said they wouldn’t meet the threshold but would still increase defense spending, Foreign Policy reported.
The US dwarfs the other members in spending by percentage of GDP.
