President Trump on Thursday told NATO members they must “contribute their fair share” so the alliance can focus on ways to fight terrorism and deal with immigration crises.
“The NATO of the future must include a great focus on terrorism and immigration, as well as threats from Russia and our NATO’s eastern and southern borders,” Trump said in a speech at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Thursday.
“These grave security concerns are the same reason that I have been very, very direct with Secretary [Jens] Stoltenberg and members of the alliance in saying that NATO members must finally contribute their fair share and meet their financial obligations,” Trump said.
Referring to “chronic underpayments,” Trump said 23 of the 28 member nations are “still not paying what they should be paying … for their defense.”
“This is not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States,” Trump said. “And many of these nations owe massive amounts of money from past years and not paying in those past years.”
As he said during the presidential campaign, Trump reiterated that the United States spends more on defense than all other NATO countries combined.
“If all NATO members had spent just 2 percent of their GDP on defense last year, we would have had another $119 billion for our collective defense and for the financing of additional NATO reserves,” Trump said.
Trump, on his first foreign trip as president, is in Brussels Thursday for meetings with European leaders and NATO officials.
The president used his NATO speech to reiterate a point he made during his Saudi Arabia visit, when he encouraged Middle Eastern allies to take on a greater role in fighting the Islamic State.
“This call for driving out terrorism is a message I took to a historic gathering of Arab and Muslim leaders across the region, hosted by Saudi Arabia,” Trump said. “The leaders of the Middle East have agreed at this unprecedented meeting to stop funding the radical ideology that leads to this horrible terrorism all over the globe.”
Trump pointed to the terror attack in Manchester, England earlier this week as an example of the reasons why NATO as an institution must do more to combat Islamic extremism.
“The recent attack on Manchester in the United Kingdom demonstrates the depths of the evil we face with terrorism. Innocent little girls and so many others were horribly murdered and badly injured while attending a concert — beautiful lives with so much great potential torn from their families forever and ever. It was a barbaric and vicious attack upon our civilization,” Trump said.
“All people who cherish life must unite in finding, exposing, and removing these killers and extremists, and, yes, losers,” the president added. “They are losers. Wherever they exist in our societies, we must drive them out and never, ever let them back in.”
