President Donald Trump is calling on members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to increase their NATO contributions to five percent of their gross domestic product (GDP).
Trump made his request to NATO allies on Thursday while speaking virtually before Klaus Schwab’s globalist World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.
“I’m also going to ask all NATO nations to increase defense spending to five percent of GDP, which is what it should have been years ago,” Trump said. “It was only at two percent, and most nations didn’t pay until I came along.”
“I insisted that they pay, and they did because the United States was really paying the difference at that time,” Trump recounted. “And it was unfair to the United States, but many, many things have been unfair for many years to the United States.”
Earlier this month, Trump told reporters he wanted the figure to increase to five percent, as the AFP noted.
“Europe is in for a tiny fraction of the money that we’re in,” Trump said. “We have a thing called the ocean in between us, right? Why are we in for billions and billions of dollars more money than Europe?”
In June 2017, former NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg announced that NATO would require members to contribute two percent of their GDP, as agreed to in 2014, after Trump called on other nations to pay their fair share. At the time, a report found that just six of 28 counties were contributing two percent or more of their GDP.
Some European leaders pushed back on Trump’s call for a five percent rate earlier this month, though they are reportedly open to increasing defense investments.
Defense ministers from France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom said last week “They want to continue increasing their investments in defense but described meeting President-elect Donald Trump’s challenge for them to raise spending to 5% of their overall economic output as complicated,” the Associated Press reported.
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