“Some experts suggest that Trump demonstrates the uselessness of NATO as a military alliance.”, — write: www.unian.ua
Some experts suggest that Trump demonstrates the uselessness of NATO as a military alliance.
Donald Trump has driven US allies into a dead end / photo REUTERSDonald Trump’s proposal that NATO members should allocate 5% of their GDP to defense has caused mixed reactions in Europe. The requirement is called inadequate, although there are those who see some sense in such costs, writes Business Insider.“I think NATO should be at 5%. They can all afford it, but they should be at 5%, not 2%,” Trump said at a news conference earlier this week.
As BI notes, today no country of the alliance, including the USA, spends 5% of GDP on defense. The closest to this indicator is Poland, which spent 4% of its GDP on defense last year. Estonia and the USA follow with 3.43% and 3.38%, respectively.
Ralf Stegner, a member of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, called Trump’s statement “delusional” and “true madness.”
Italian Defense Minister Guido Crozetto suggested that spending such a percentage of GDP on defense “would be impossible for almost all countries in the world.” By the way, Italy spent only 1.49% of GDP on defense last year.
However, for countries closer to Russia, which are watching the invasion of Ukraine from the front row, Trump’s proposal does not seem like such a bad idea, writes BI. For example, earlier the Minister of Defense of Poland positively evaluated this call.
Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal said it was “a message that Estonia has been championing for years.” “This is a clear signal to Putin that he should not dare to test NATO’s nerves and that we are ready for this,” he said.
However, analysts consider Trump’s 5% figure to be unrealistic. Nan Tian, director of the Military Expenditure and Arms Production Program at the Stockholm Institute for Peace Studies, noted that 5% of GDP is more than NATO countries spent on defense at the height of the Cold War.
“Many European NATO countries are financing increased military spending through debt, other spending cuts and tax hike proposals. These existing increases will push military spending to about half of Trump’s proposed 5 percent of GDP, so I don’t think that this is a realistic goal,” he said.
Ruther Diermond, a senior lecturer in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, suggests that Trump is deliberately making unrealistically inflated demands on allies so that they are impossible to meet.
“It also signals that NATO is no longer a significant alliance,” he is convinced.
Trump’s incredible demandsAs UNIAN wrote, a sharp increase in NATO spending on its own defense is not the only incredible demand that Trump has voiced recently. For several days now, the world has been discussing a hypothetical US aggression against Canada, Denmark and Panama, as hinted at by the US president-elect.
Trump believes that Denmark should hand over the island of Greenland to the United States, Panama – the Panama Canal, and he wants to make Canada one of the states of the United States. And one single one, not several separate ones.
Trump’s US national security adviser Michael Waltz said that all possible options for meeting these requirements are being considered. In particular, he did not rule out a force scenario.
You may also be interested in news:
- “It makes no sense for Russia to “take” only Transnistria. It needs all of Moldova. And this will be a powerful blow to Ukraine,” – political scientist from Moldova Vitaliy Andrievskyi
- There is a conversation with Zelensky: Starmer will come to Ukraine in the near future, – Bloomberg
- Ukraine reacted to the preparations for the meeting between Trump and Putin