NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte admitted that U.S. President Donald Trump is being absolutely fair to demand that European allies spend more on defense.
"He is right of course, that the problem is not the U.S. and the problem is Europe," Rutte said at a breakfast discussion about Ukraine at the World Economic Forum on Thursday, after key Trump ally Richard Grenell criticized him over the Netherlands' defense spending and his own track record when he was Dutch prime minister.
Grenell, now Trump's presidential envoy for “special missions,” said Thursday that NATO shouldn't accept Ukraine into the transatlantic military alliance unless its members start hitting the group's defense spending targets.
"We have the NATO secretary-general talking about adding Ukraine to NATO," Grenell told the Davos panel, tuning in on video from Los Angeles. "The American people are the ones that are paying for the defense. You cannot ask the American people to expand the umbrella of NATO when the current members aren't paying their fair share, and that includes the Dutch who need to step up.
"And so when [...] we have leaders who are going to talk about more and more, we need to make sure that those leaders are spending the right amount of money," he added.
Ukraine, which has been under attack by Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces for years now, has unsuccessfully pushed NATO to be admitted to the group.
When Rutte was Dutch prime minister, the Netherlands regularly failed to meet NATO's 2 percent of GDP defense spending target. But he's a convert now that he runs the world's most powerful military alliance.
"Thanks partly also to [Trump] and maybe to a large extent, we have seen this upturn in spending in NATO on the European side," the NATO chief said.
"He felt that basically the U.S. was getting a bad deal and that Europe basically was funding its social model, its health care system, its pension system [while] we're underfunding in defense. The problem, of course, is that we are not yet all at that 2 percent. That's problem No. 1. Problem No. 2 is that 2 percent is not nearly enough. To your point, it is not nearly enough," Rutte said.
"We are safe now, but NATO collectively is not able to defend itself in 4 or 5 years if you stick to 2 percent now," he added, amid fears that an increasingly belligerent Putin could turn his attention to an attack on a NATO member country.
In his own speech at Davos earlier this week shortly after Trump was inaugurated as U.S. president, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy took aim at Europe in a blunt speech, saying the continent “needs to step up” and “learn how to take care of itself so the world can’t ignore it.”
Trump has repeatedly harangued NATO allies to spend more on defense, discussed pulling the U.S. out of the transatlantic military alliance, suggested massive new military spending targets and, on the 2024 election campaign trail, even said he would "encourage" Russia to attack NATO countries who don’t pay up.
Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo was also at the Davos breakfast panel Thursday, and he took the opportunity to remind allies to focus less on sniping at each other, and more on the real villain of the moment.
"The enemy is Vladimir Putin. The enemy is outside. It's not inside. And I see a lot of finger-pointing ... That's not helpful," De Croo said.
Politico
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