NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has admitted that US President Donald Trump is right to demand that European allies spend more on defence.
This was reported by Politico.
‘Of course, he is right that the problem is not in the United States, but in Europe,’ Rutte said at the World Economic Forum in response to accusations by President Trump's special missions envoy Richard Grenell that European NATO members are spending insufficiently on defence.
‘We have a NATO secretary general who is talking about Ukraine joining NATO,’ Grenell said at the Davos discussion. ‘The American people are the ones who pay for defence. You cannot ask the American people to expand the NATO umbrella when current members are not paying their fair share, and that includes the Dutch, who need to step up.’
When Mark Rutte was prime minister of the Netherlands, the country regularly failed to meet NATO's 2% of GDP defence spending target.
‘Partly thanks to [Trump], and perhaps to a large extent, we have seen an increase in spending by European NATO members,’ the Alliance Secretary General said. ’The problem, of course, is that not all of us are paying 2%. And another problem is that 2% is not enough. We are safe now, but NATO will not be able to defend itself in 4 or 5 years if we spend 2% now.’
As a reminder, Donald Trump has repeatedly called on NATO allies to spend more on defence, threatening to withdraw the United States from the Alliance.
According to the Financial Times, Trump will demand that NATO member states increase defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP.