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“What Good Is NATO?” Trump Asks, Putting U.S. Commitment to Anti-Russia Alliance In Doubt

The American president sent an inflammatory tweet in which he demanded that Germany and other European allies “IMMEDIATELY” increase defense spending.

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NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (L), US President Donald Trump (R), NATO Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs and Security Policy Alejandro Alvargonzalez (2L), NATO Spokesperson Oana Lungescu (3L) and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly (3R) and US Ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison (2R) speak at a breakfast meeting at the US chief of mission's residence in Brussels on July 11, 2018, ahead of a NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) summit. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo credit should read BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (L), US President Donald Trump (R), NATO Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs and Security Policy Alejandro Alvargonzalez (2L), NATO Spokesperson Oana Lungescu (3L) and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly (3R) and US Ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison (2R) speak at a breakfast meeting at the US chief of mission's residence in Brussels on July 11, 2018, ahead of a NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) summit. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo credit should read BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images) AFP/Getty Images

Donald Trump threw the NATO summit in Brussels into chaos on Wednesday by pressing send on an inflammatory tweet in which he demanded that Germany and other European nations should all-caps “IMMEDIATELY” increase their spending on defense.

By claiming that the U.S. “is paying for Europe’s protection, then loses billions on trade,” Trump returned to the complaint he first aired in 1987, in an open letter attacking the Reagan administration for not requiring American allies to pay more for their defense.

Trump posted the tweet after informing other NATO leaders that he wanted them to spend twice the previously agreed target of 2 percent of their gross domestic products on defense.

At the start of the day, Trump had dispensed with polite formalities and stunned the alliance’s leader by claiming that “Germany, as far as I’m concerned, is captive to Russia” as a result of a new pipeline to import Russian natural gas.

Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, looked taken aback at Trump’s blunt, public attack on a key U.S. ally. As a result of the gas deal, Trump claimed, “Germany is totally controlled by Russia.”

In case German Chancellor Angela Merkel might have missed Trump’s tirade, the American president posted a White House recording of the comments on Twitter.

Video of the entire exchange, posted on YouTube by both the White House and RT, the Kremlin-financed news network, showed that Trump also said Germany “should’ve never have been allowed” to strike a multibillion dollar deal with Gazprom, the state-controlled Russian gas company. The German government recently agreed to let Gazprom and its partners build the $10 billion Nord Stream 2 pipeline under the Baltic Sea, which gives the Russian state firm a way to provide gas to Western Europe that does not rely on an older pipeline through Ukraine.

Merkel, who grew up in Soviet-dominated East Germany, rejected Trump’s criticism ahead of a meeting with him on Wednesday afternoon.

“I’ve experienced myself a part of Germany controlled by the Soviet Union,” she told reporters, “and I’m very happy today that we are united in freedom as the Federal Republic of Germany and can thus say that we can determine our own policies and make our own decisions and that’s very good.”

The chancellor also rejected Trump’s claim that the U.S. “is protecting Germany,” by noting that “the largest part of our military capacity is offered to NATO and until today we have a strong presence in Afghanistan. In that way, we also protect the interests of the United States.”

In one part of his monologue, Trump claimed, inaccurately, that Germany would be buying “70 percent of their energy from Russia.” According to the German government, just 9 percent of the country’s energy needs come from Russian natural gas.

The American president also veered into fiction when he suggested that while Germany imported Russian gas, “you have a country like Poland that won’t accept the gas … because they don’t want to be captive to Russia.” As the Polish journalist Oskar Górzynski noted, Poland still gets most of its gas from Russia.

Trump also complained, as he has for three decades, that Germany and other members of the alliance, including France, spend less on defense than the United States. To make his point, Trump inaccurately referred to all American defense spending as if it were a contribution to NATO, and mistakenly described the failure of other European allies to spend more as an unpaid debt owed to the U.S.

If Trump’s aim is to shame Germany into paying more for its own defense, and not just to embarrass Merkel in hopes of denting her popularity, his intervention is unlikely to succeed.

Marcel Dirsus, a political scientist at Kiel University, observed that Merkel has been making the case for more defense spending, but “Trump makes her job more difficult because he is highly unpopular in Germany and politicians don’t want to be seen as giving in to his threats.”

https://twitter.com/marceldirsus/status/1016961875198775296

Another German commentator, Ulrich Speck, noted that polls show little support for Merkel’s position that Germany should spend more than it already does on its military.

Despite Trump’s complaints about Germany spending money on Russian gas, Mathieu von Rohr, the deputy foreign editor of the German weekly Der Spiegel, pointed out that Merkel “was instrumental in delivering the West’s response to the Ukraine crisis,” which involved sanctions on Russian businesses.

Von Rohr also suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin must be enjoying the spectacle of an American president driving a wedge into the military alliance dedicated to containing Russia.

According to the Russian-born journalist Julia Ioffe, a source from Moscow attending the summit said that the Kremlin was indeed pleased with the damage Trump was doing to the alliance.

Update: July 11, 2018, 1:34 p.m. EDT
This report and its headline were updated after the inflammatory tweet Donald Trump posted following his meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Top photo: Donald Trump invited NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to breakfast on Wednesday and served him orange juice and a tirade about Germany.

Contact the author:

robert.mackey@​theintercept.com @RobertMackey on X

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