NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday that its European members and Canada have ramped up defence spending to record levels, as he warned that former US President Donald Trump was undermining their security by calling into question the US commitment to its allies.
Stoltenberg said US partners in NATO have spent USD 600 billion more on their military budgets since 2014 when Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine prompted them all to reverse the spending cuts they had made after the Cold War ended.
“Last year we saw an unprecedented rise of 11 per cent across European allies and Canada,” Stoltenberg told reporters on the eve of a meeting of the organisation’s defence ministers in Brussels.
In 2014, NATO leaders committed to move toward spending 2 per cent of their gross domestic product on defence within a decade. It has mostly been slow going, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago focused minds. The 2 per cent figure is now considered a minimum requirement.
“This year, I expect 18 allies to spend 2 per cent of the GDP on defence. That is another record number and a six-fold increase from 2014 when only three allies met the target,” Stoltenberg said.
On Saturday, Trump, the front-runner in the US for the Republican Party’s nomination this year, said he once warned that he would allow Russia to do whatever it wants to NATO members that are “delinquent” in devoting 2 per cent of GDP to defence.
President Joe Biden branded Trump’s remarks “dangerous” and “un-American,” seizing on the former president’s
comments as they fuel doubt among US partners about its future dependability on the global stage.
Stoltenberg said those comments call into question the credibility of NATO’s collective security commitment Article 5 of the organisation’s founding treaty, which says that an attack on any member country will be met with a response from
all of them