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Donald Trump has assured the NATO allies that he is “with them all the way”, after giving the European capitals with his suggestion that the Mutual Defense Pact of the Military Alliance was open to the interpretation.
The president of the United States, with his 31 NATO allies in The Hague, on Wednesday at a summit dedicated to his promise to increase national defense expenditure to 5 percent of GDP in exchange for Trump’s safe support to maintain the protection of the United States.
When asked about his commitment to NATO after arriving at the summit, Trump said: “We are with them all the way.”
“NATO will become very strong with us,” Trump said, along with the general secretary of the Alliance, Mark Rutte, before a formal session that adopted the promise of expenses of 5 percent by 2035, and so many years had demanded.
Trump’s positive rhetoric suggested Rutte’s ploy to focus the meeting on increasing defense spending and lavishing the president of the United States with praise. The NATO official’s strategy also apparently deposited about the concerns between European capitals about the tax pressure scale that will put in their budgets.
A joint statement agreed by the 32 allies said that “our Ironclad commitment to collective defense” and “would present annual plans that show a credible and incremental path to the 5 percent objective. An expense objective review will take place in 2029.
The statement contains only one reference to Russia, citing the “long-term threat that Russia represents to the security of the Euro-Atlantic” and a sentence that refers to “lasting sovereign commitments to provide support to Ukraine.”
That marks a surprising change in the tone of an alliance that formed to defend against Moscow and has spent the last three years focusing on supporting Kyiv, and reflects Trump’s skepticism to Russia as an adversary and his warm posture.
Trump’s statement to support NATO occurred after the alarm caused on his way to The Hague by the Count’s reporters aboard Air Force One that Washington’s commitment to article 5 of NATO, which refers to his mutual defense pact, “depends on his defense.”
Trump said there were “numerous definitions” of article 5. “I am committed to being his friends. I will give him an exact definition when he gets there.”
Routte has struggled to make the summit friendly with Trump, reducing it to a two and a half hours discussion and praising it repeatedly.
“For too long, an ally, the United States, took too much load,” Routte said as he opened the summit. “That changes today … Dear Donald, you made this change possible.”
Routte also referred to Trump’s use of a improper when he scolded Israel and Iran for alleged infractions of a high fire of the United States on Tuesday, saying: “Dad sometimes has to use a strong language.”
The NATO unit in the new spending objective has been challenged by Spain, which assured an exclusion option by promising to fill the empty military capacity at a lower cost.
“Spain does not agree, which is very unfair to the rest of them,” Trump said on Air Force One on Tuesday.
He added that the United States should not pay the same as “everyone else”, arguing that European defense expense helped boost infrastructure and “we have no roads in Europe, we have no bridges in Europe.”
The United States, with much, the largest defense speaker in NATO, is the irreplaceable member state of the Alliance, with many European countries that depend on its long -range assets, intelligence and surveillance.
While previous US presidents have demanded that European allies spend more in defense, Trump has gone far than their predecessors in linking Washington’s security support with their commitments.
He has also demanded that defense expense be “matched” between the United States and the rest of the Alliance so that US military assets can focus more on Asia and the Middle East.
“With the Trump administration, everything is a negotiation and everything is on the table,” said Sophia Gaston, a King’s College London researcher. “Anyone who creates something different is frankly naive.”
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