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Trump to NATO allies: Raise military spending to 4 percent of GDP
[Al Jazeera] US President Donald Trump...New York real estate developer, described by Dems as illiterate, racist, misogynistic, and what ever other unpleasant descriptions they can think of, elected by the rest of us as 45th President of the United States... has told NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A collection of multinational and multilingual and multicultural armed forces, all of differing capabilities, working toward a common goal by pulling in different directions... countries to increase their defence spending to four percent of their gross domestic product, higher than the group's goal of two percent, a White House official said on Wednesday. The official said the president's remarks were not a formal proposal but came as he was urging leaders of the 29-member military alliance to increase their outlays on defence. The US president has been openly critical of his NATO allies since becoming president in January 2017. Ahead of the summit being held in the Belgian capital, Brussels, Trump sent out a tweet about the funding of NATO. Trump has repeatedly said the US was bearing an unfair burden because it spends many times more of its GDP on defence than other NATO countries. Speaking at the summit, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg earlier said that members states had agreed to spend more on defence in the coming years. "All allies are increasing defence spending. This year at least eight of the NATO countries have committed to spend at least two percent of their GDP on defence and a majority of our allies have plans to do so by 2024," Stoltenberg said during a presser in Brussels. "For a quarter of a century many countries have been cutting billions from their defence budgets. Now they are adding billions," he added. Posted by: Fred 2018-07-12 |
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