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Donald Trump believes that the European members of NATO must spend five percent of their gross domestic product (GNP) on defense – and not two percent, which is the goal of the defense alliance today.
It came out during Trump’s press conference at Mar-a-Lago earlier Tuesday, writes the Reuters news agency.
“I believe that NATO should have five percent. You can’t manage it with two percent,” said Trump, among other things.
“They are in dangerous territory. They can all afford it, but they should be at five percent and not two percent”, he continued, referring to the European NATO countries.
Already in December, it emerged that Donald Trump wanted to raise the target for how much the individual NATO countries must spend on military.
At the time, it was the American newspaper Financial Times that wrote about the case on the basis of statements from anonymous sources.
At the press conference on Tuesday evening, it was the first time that Trump publicly expressed the wish that defense spending should constitute five percent of the individual countries’ GDP.
Here Trump also said that he understands Russia’s reluctance for Ukraine to become a member of NATO.
At the same time, he accused President Joe Biden of having changed the United States’ official position in relation to possible Ukrainian membership.
“A big part of the problem is that for many, many years – long before Putin – Russia said that ‘you can’t have Nato getting involved with Ukraine'”.
“And at some point along the way, Biden said ‘no, they must be admitted to NATO’. Then Russia has someone (a NATO member, ed.) standing on the doorstep, and I can understand their feelings about it,” said Trump.
Since a summit in 2008, NATO members have supported a future Ukrainian membership of the alliance, but Ukraine has not been formally invited to join NATO.
Trump believes that Ukrainian membership will provoke Russia unnecessarily, while Ukraine, during the ongoing war in the country, has repeatedly called on NATO to invite the country to begin an admission process.
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Source: politiken.dk
