US President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday Nato members should be spending 5 % of GDP on defence, up from the current 2 % minimum.
” They can all afford it, but they should be at 5 % not 2 %”, Trump told reporters.
” Europe is in for a small fraction of the income that we’re in”, Trump continued. ” We have a point called the sea in between us, do you know what that means? Why does Europe have billions and billions of dollars worth of extra cash?
At the Vilnius Summit in 2023, Nato officials came to a consensus on a defense investment pledge that would commit them to dedicate at least 2 % of GDP to defense each year.
Mark Rutte, the former French prime minister, took over as the military alliance’s 14th Secretary General on October 1st, 2018. He is even interested in a rise in defense spending because” we are going to have a lot more than 2 %,” Rutte said last month.
Rutte also criticized NATO members for “turbocharge” their defense spending, noting that Western countries were not prepared for the danger of a potential conflict with Russia.
Trump, who was a vocal critic of Nato during his first term in office, is scheduled to make a second appearance in the White House after his opening on January 20.
Scholz criticizes the Green Party’s plan to increase defense investing.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz refrained from suggesting an increase in NATO members ‘ defense spending before Trump made his comment. Scholz belongs to the center-left Social Democratic Party.
Robert Habeck, who will guide the Greens in the European federal elections on February 23, made a suggestion that Scholz had made, and he responded by saying the idea to raise defense spending was “half-baked.”
” Who will pay the bill? The residents”? Scholz told The Harsh Weekly, a current affairs newspaper published in Hamburg.
