The former president’s long-standing view that European allies should bear more of their own defense costs could come to a head in a second term.
The former president’s long-standing view that European allies should bear more of their own defense costs could come to a head if he is elected again
This story is part of an occasional series reexamining episodes from the Trump presidency to better understand how Trump would exert power if returned to the White House.Trump’s threats to leave NATO rattled European officials and others when he was last in office, but at the time, White House aides always privately assured allies that the president would not follow through, according to a European ambassador to Washington.
Bolton, though, doesn’t share that confidence. “For people to say he’s just bargaining, they haven’t heard Trump directly the way I had,” he said.There has been near-unanimous bipartisan support for the alliance as a counter to first Soviet and later Russian ambitions for decades. But frustration with European free-riding on U.S. military might also dates back to NATO’s first decade. In 1959, President Dwight D.
But to aides, Trump frequently ranted privately about the alliance, griping that European countries complained about Moscow’s aggression but propped up the Russian economy by buying natural gas and that the Europeans “screwed us on trade deals,” according to Bolton. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser from February 2017 to April 2018, repeatedly told Trump that the 2 percent guidepost for military spending was a goal and not a requirement. No country owed the United States money as a result. “There is no payment due,” McMaster would say, according to the former official. “It’s a goal.”
“It was quite a summit,” said Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics, who took part in the 2018 summit as his country’s foreign minister. “We actually were supportive of his push to spend more. There was an understanding that the U.S. will not accept a free ride.” “This time they’ll be more prepared to have people in the administration who are more aligned to the America First idea,” said Sumantra Maitra, a senior fellow at the pro-Trump think tank Center for Renewing America whose, a coalition of more than 90 conservative groups convened by the Heritage Foundation to develop off-the-rack policy plans for the next Republican administration. In the chapter on the Defense Department, Miller proposed to “Transform NATO so that U.S.
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