Thread: Trump to attend NATO summit in Brussels amid complaint allies owe 'vast sums'

Trump to attend NATO summit in Brussels amid complaint allies owe 'vast sums'

Gregory Korte, USA TODAY
Published 11:16 p.m. ET March 21, 2017

President Donald Trump said Saturday that Germany owes "vast sums of money" to NATO and the U.S. "must be paid more" for providing defense, reiterating his stance that European allies need to meet their end of the bargain.

WASHINGTON — President Trump will travel to Brussels in May for a NATO summit, the White House said Tuesday.

The announcement comes as Trump has roiled the alliance with renewed complaints about how much European allies are paying for their defense. But administration officials say the U.S. has a "strong commitment" to the alliance.

In a meeting at the White House with German Chancellor Angela Merkel last week, Trump suggested that allies owe "vast sums of money from past years."

He followed up that meeting with a tweet demanding that "the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!"

Those statements reflected a shift in U.S. policy. At the most recent NATO summits in Wales and Poland, nations agreed to spend at least 2% of their economic output on defense by 2024, but the agreement was not retrospective and the money is not owed to the United States. "There is no debt account in NATO," German defense minister Ursula von der Leyen said Sunday.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday that Trump "looks forward to meeting with his NATO counterparts to reaffirm our strong commitment to NATO." But he also alluded to two issues where Trump has been critical of the alliance, saying Trump hoped to "discuss issues critical to the alliance, especially allied responsibility-sharing and NATO’s role in the fight against terrorism."

Also Tuesday, the State Department said Rex Tillerson would be the first secretary of State to skip a meeting with NATO foreign ministers for the first time in 14 years, raising more questions about the U.S. commitment to the 68-year-old alliance. Instead, Tillerson will travel to Russia, NATO's chief rival, amid an FBI investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 election.

But from lecterns across Washington Tuesday, the Trump administration professed support for NATO. "The United States remains 100% committed to NATO. President Trump said this in his very first address to a joint session of Congress. He said our commitment to NATO is unwavering and it remains so," State Department spokesman Mark Toner said.

At the Pentagon, secretary of Defense James Mattis met with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. "We have a very strong trans-Atlantic bond. It's getting stronger," Mattis said. "It's built on a legacy of common commitments and common defense, and we never forget that in this building."

The White House said Trump would meet with Stoltenberg at the White House on April 12.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...sums/99479178/

Oh good grief!! What in the world are all these meetings by everyone with NATO Alliance about? Afraid they're going to have to pay their fair share? Get all this NATO crap over with. NATO needs to focus on fighting terrorism, we've already made that clear, NATO countries need to beef up their defense spending and pay more to the United States for what we do for them, and that's it. USA is going to make peace with Russia and straighten all that out, probably move towards a trade agreement, and end all this ancient needless Cold War Crap. Russia has never been our enemy or Europe's. Read up on your history and be sure not to miss the BOTTOM-LINE.

These NATO countries must pay their portions. Germany needs to pay all monies owed. The United States and President Trump will hopefully keep the pressure on all to keep their commitments at this meeting.

I think he'll use his time promoting bi-lateral trade agreements to bring down the EU. That's what I would do.