Europe is “dreaming” if it thinks it can defend itself without U.S. support. So says NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte who warned Monday the European Union (E.U.) would have to more than double current military spending targets to be able to replicate America’s contribution to the security of the continent.
“If anyone thinks here … that the European Union or Europe as a whole can defend itself without the U.S., keep on dreaming. You can’t,” Rutte told E.U. lawmakers in Brussels per an AP report.
Europe and the United States “need each other,” he further warned as Russia continues to hammer at the door in Eastern Europe with its aggression against Ukraine.
NATO’s geo-political ambitions have been tested since U.S. President Donald Trump’s renewed his push to annex Greenland, which is a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark.
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The 32-nation military organization is bound together by a mutual defense clause, Article 5 of NATO’s founding Washington treaty, which commits every country to come to the defense of an ally whose territory is under threat.
The AP report further sets out at NATO’s summit in The Hague last year, European allies — with the exception of Spain — plus Canada agreed to Trump’s demand they invest the same percentage of their economic output on defense as the United States within a decade.
They pledged to spend 3.5 percent of gross domestic product on core defense, and a further 1.5 percent on security-related infrastructure – a total of five percent of GDP – by 2035, as Breitbart News reported.
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