THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — President Donald Trump on Wednesday will meet with members of a NATO alliance that he has worked to bend to his will over the years and whose members are rattled by his latest comments casting doubt on the U.S. commitment to its mutual defense guarantees.
Trump’s comments en route to the Netherlands that his fidelity to Article 5 “depends on your definition” are likely to draw a spotlight at the NATO summit, as will the new and fragile Iran-Israel ceasefire that Trump helped broker after the U.S. unloaded airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
At the same time, the alliance is poised to enact one of Trump’s chief priorities for NATO: a pledge by its member countries to increase, sometimes significantly, how much they spend on their defense.
“NATO was broke, and I said, ‘You’re going to have to pay,’” Trump said Tuesday. “And we did a whole thing, and now they’re paying a lot. Then I said, ‘You’re going to have to lift it to 4% or 5%, and 5% is better.’”
Spending 5% of a country’s gross domestic product on defense is “good,” Trump pronounced, adding, “It gives them much more power.”
The boost in spending follows years of Trump complaints that other countries weren’t paying their fair share for membership in an alliance created as a bulwark against threats from the former Soviet Union. Most NATO countries, with the key exception of Spain, are preparing to endorse the 5% pledge, motivated to bolster their own defenses not just by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine but also, perhaps, to placate Trump.
As a candidate in 2016, Trump suggested that he as president would not necessarily heed the alliance’s mutual defense guarantees outlined in Article 5 of the NATO treaty. In March of this year, he expressed uncertainty that NATO would come to the United States’ defense if needed, though the alliance did just that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
On Tuesday, he told reporters aboard Air Force One on his way to The Hague for the summit that whether he is committed to Article 5 “depends on your definition.”
“There’s numerous definitions of Article 5. You know that, right?” Trump said. “But I’m committed to being their friends.” He signaled that he would give a more precise definition of what Article 5 means to him once he is at the summit.
Trump also vented to reporters before leaving Washington about the actions by Israel and Iran after his announced ceasefire. He said, in his view, both sides had violated the nascent agreement.
After Trump arrived in the Netherlands, news outlets, including The Associated Press, published stories revealing that a U.S. intelligence report suggested in an early assessment that Iran’s nuclear program had been set back only a few months by weekend strikes and was not “completely and fully obliterated,” as Trump had said.
The White House called the report “flat-out wrong,” and Trump posted in all-caps on social media early Wednesday that any reporting that the strikes weren’t “completely destroyed” was an attempt to “demean one of the most successful military strikes in history.”
The White House has not said what other world leaders Trump would meet with one-on-one while in The Hague, but he said he was likely to cross paths with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
