The Biden administration immediately criticized these statements, calling them “appalling and disturbing.”
Trump has long criticized what he sees as European countries taking advantage of US military largesse, but he has disagreed CThe statement over the weekend was provocative even by Trump's standards.
It also raised confusion in some quarters: No one, including the president's former senior advisers, remembers saying such a thing to a fellow head of state, as he claimed.
The 25-second clip of Trump's speech on Saturday night reverberated around the world on Sunday, as diplomats parsed the meaning of what many saw as the most controversial statement on NATO yet by a former president who repeatedly criticized the alliance during his tenure, as he spoke Often. With admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Hours earlier, in a separate attack targeting another pillar of US foreign policy, Trump pledged to effectively end US aid to countries abroad. Trump wrote that economic development aid and military aid to foreign countries — a mainstay of Democratic and Republican administrations for decades, intended in part to relieve suffering and support American national security abroad — would be replaced by a loan program that must be repaid. In a post on his social media platform Truth Social.
“We should never again give money without hope of getting it back, or without strings attached,” Trump said in a bolded post. He wrote that any loans must be repaid immediately if the recipient turns against us, or gets rich at some point in the future.
The immediate reaction from European leaders and diplomats ranged from anger to weary resignation.
“Unfortunately, Trump is not surprised,” Markku Mikkelson, head of the Estonian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said in a text message. The current presidential campaign only confirms that he has not changed his reckless attitude toward his allies. Unfortunately, it is therefore a very convenient tool for Putin's Russia, which is waging war against the West.
Some European policymakers said Trump's rhetoric represented a security threat to the continent. A senior German lawmaker, who was a top foreign policy aide to Chancellor Angela Merkel, wrote that Europe needs to prepare to stand alone.
Norbert Röttgen wrote on his Facebook page: “Everyone should watch this video from Trump and then understand that Europe may soon have no choice but to defend itself.” “We have to manage this because anything else would be giving up and abandoning ourselves!”
Trump's comments were part of a regular election campaign against NATO allies who failed to comply with a 2006 pledge to eventually raise military spending levels to 2 percent of their country's gross domestic product. In 2018, Trump rocked a NATO Allied summit in Brussels with harsh comments suggesting the United States might not comply with its commitment to defend other alliance members from attack unless they paid more money.
Several diplomats who attended the 2018 summit — including Trump's senior advisers — said the former president's comments… The threats at the time were much milder than the version he told in his speech on Saturday.
John Bolton, Trump's national security adviser in 2018 and now an outspoken critic of his former boss, said Trump actually pressured NATO partners aggressively to increase military spending — a goal that multiple administrations have pursued over the past decades. “But he didn’t say anything about not defending anyone against Russia,” Bolton said in an interview.
Regarding the veracity of the anecdote, Bolton said Trump “may be putting a bunch of things together in his head,” adding: “He's making these conversations up.”
“But even though the conversation may be made up, I think he believes it,” Bolton said. Bolton says in a new edition of his 2020 memoir that Trump will likely seek to withdraw from NATO if elected to a second term.
“He wanted excuses to get out, while the rest of us wanted NATO allies to spend as much as they had committed and more, because it was in their own interests and would strengthen NATO,” Bolton said. “This is the case where you have to take it literally.”
Trump's anger at European laggards on defense spending was a throwback to his turbulent tenure in office, when Europeans faced questions about whether the United States would protect them if they were attacked by Russia.
At the time, many European policymakers eventually decided that Trump's public rhetoric was too threatening, in part because his administration's national security policymakers were generally from the ranks of the Republican establishment. Bolton and then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis were longtime Russia hawks, and took notice of some of Trump's unorthodox defense ideas.
But Trump's threat, Combined with a grim new war on the European continent, it may have had some effect. NATO countries have increased their defense spending significantly since 2016, and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine served as an additional incentive for their investments. Of the six NATO countries bordering Russia, only one, Norway, still spends less than the alliance's annual defense target of 2 percent of its gross domestic product. It says it will reach that level by 2026.
When President Biden took office, he devoted much of his energy on the foreign policy front to healing the transatlantic divisions that came from the Trump years. Even before the attack on Ukraine, Biden succeeded in bringing Europeans together to help Kiev. Germany — Trump's main European power — pivoted just days after the invasion by abandoning its decades-long dependence on Russian gas and promising to invest more aggressively in its military.
However, American policymakers and experts have warned that Biden's embrace of European allies masks a broader trend of increasing American frustration with its central role in supporting European defense. Biden and Trump are among a dwindling generation of American leaders who matured during the Cold War, with younger leaders on both sides of the aisle less affected by the legacy of Europe's post-World War II rebuilding and competition with the Soviet Union. Even before Trump's presidency, President Barack Obama also complained about European defense spending, albeit in a more polite way.
Policymakers say the Republican Party's accelerating abandonment of Ukraine in recent months is the latest warning sign. For months, Biden's request for $61 billion in aid to Ukraine has stalled in Congress, even as the Ukrainian military on the front lines runs out of shells and essential equipment.
Congress has taken steps to make it difficult for any future US president to withdraw from NATO, but experts say Washington's formal commitments to the alliance may be less important than the White House's willingness to back up its promises of military action.
NATO members' obligations under Article 5 are a promise to help each other if they are attacked, not a formal legal requirement, so the alliance could become irrelevant under a second Trump term even if the United States does not formally close its mission within NATO. NATO's glass headquarters in Brussels.
At the same time, despite all the security investments Europe has made in recent years, it remains highly dependent on the military umbrella provided by Washington. Some countries, including Germany, have not increased their spending as quickly as their leaders initially promised in the wake of the Russian attack on Kiev.
Several European policymakers said Sunday that Trump's comments were just another reminder that Europe needs to be less dependent on Washington.
Some policymakers from NATO countries bordering Russia, accustomed to four years of Trump's sniping of the alliance, said they were not immediately alarmed by his latest comments.
“I don't get paid to worry,” said Latvian President Edgars Rinkević, who was present at the 2018 NATO summit that Trump seemed to refer to in his comments.
He noted that Latvia spends 2.4 percent of its GDP on defence, which far exceeds NATO commitments. He said: “The important thing is that Europe must spend more on defense, on capabilities, and increase defense production, regardless of who wins in the United States, as this is in our vital interest.”
Trump has “no values, no international experience and a purely transactional mentality,” said Sergei Lagodinsky, a German member of the European Parliament, member of the hardline Green Party and one of his country’s leading voices calling for increased defense. Investments. “So it's a reminder to us. We need to be more serious about our own abilities.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who recently visited Washington for a visit that included meetings with American governors, said the alliance “remains ready and capable of defending all allies.” Any attack on NATO will be met with a unified and strong response.”
But Stoltenberg acknowledged the harm of questioning collective defense. “Any suggestion that allies will not stand up for each other undermines our entire security, including that of the United States, and exposes American and European soldiers to increased danger,” he said in a prepared statement.
He added: “I expect that regardless of who wins the presidential election, the United States will remain a strong and committed ally in NATO.”
In Washington, many political leaders expressed dismay at Trump's rhetoric, although some Republicans tried to defend their party's supposed standard-bearer. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in a televised interview that he believed Trump was merely “telling a story.”
“Trump is not a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He doesn't talk like a traditional politician. “We've already been through this now,” Rubio said on CNN's “State of the Union.”
“He told the story of how he used his influence to push people to step up to the plate and become more active in NATO,” Rubio said. “Almost every US president has at some point complained in one way or another that other countries in NATO are not doing enough. Trump is the first to express it in these terms.
Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who is running against Trump in the Republican primary race, said that if elected president, she would respect US commitments to NATO and would never side with “thugs.” In an interview with CBS News' “Face the Nation,” she said she would “never stand for someone who came in and invaded a country and had half a million people killed or injured because of Putin.”
Warrick and Birnbaum reported from Washington and Rauhala from Brussels. Mariana Alfaro in Washington contributed to this report.
