Trump says he will ‘encourage Russia to do what it wants’ with NATO if Europeans don’t spend more on defense

Vladimir Putin has received great news from Conway, a city of 22,000 population in South Carolina. There, on the campus of the Universidad de la Costa, the former president and candidate for President of the United States Donald Trump Said told a European leader He, If it does not increase its contribution to NATOHe would “encourage (Russia) to do whatever it wants.”

Trump’s phrase is a new signal – if anyone needed it – that the Republican nominee Does not rule out removing the United States from the Atlantic allianceA possibility that, in fact, is in its electoral program and that has forced the United States Congress – with the votes of Democrats and Republicans – to include in this year’s defense budget a rule prohibiting its implementation.

Leaving NATO would be a complex legislative process, in which Trump Would require massive support from Congress which it could not achieve, But there is another very different thing Article 5, which guarantees the mutual security of alliance members. There, The President has the ability to act practically alone,

With his statements, Trump has once again touched the most sensitive nerve of his European and, by extension, Asian allies, who fear Chinese expansionism for fear of seeing themselves become the next Ukraine. Furthermore, the former president and now candidate’s statements – which were greeted with applause from his audience – were a set of lies that he has been repeating since he entered politics in 2015 and that apparently no one has been able to refute. Not there.

NATO has no budget. what yes there is a commitment -non-binding- of 2006 so that All countries allocate at least 2% of their GDP to defence. And this 20% of that amount for the purchase of new military equipment, That second figure is relevant, because it represents a commitment that spending will actually be allocated to arms acquisition, and not to other items which, while important, do not have such a direct impact on a country’s defense. .

In 2014, when Russia first invaded Ukraine, only two countries reached that number, the US and Great Britain. In 2023, a year and a half after the war in Ukraine, there were already 10: the two from 2014 plus Poland (which is the coalition’s biggest spender on defense), Romania, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Greece, Slovakia and Greece. This list shows that there are Direct proportional relationship between proximity to Russia and increase in military spending, Thus, it is Vladimir Putin, not Donald Trump, who has encouraged Europeans to spend more on defense. Regarding the commitment that 20% of defense spending would go to the acquisition of new military material, all NATO countries met it in 2023, while only 7 countries did in 2014.

The Republican Party has responded to Trump’s statements with their usual strategy: looking the other way. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who had considerable influence in the White House during Trump’s first term, when he practically directed U.S. policy toward Latin America, said that “Donald Trump is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations (the most influential think tank) American foreign policy), and does not speak like a traditional politician.

Rubio said that “by the time he arrived, NATO was bankrupt because people didn’t pay their dues,” which is another outrage because NATO, unlike a neighboring community, for example, pays dues to its members. does not do.