U.S. Ambassador Threatens to Pull Troops from Germany to Poland

The U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell was indignant at the German authorities’ reluctance to increase defense spending and threatened to relocate military bases to Poland, UNIAN reported on August 9. According to reports, his dissatisfaction is due to the fact that German Chancellor Angela Merkel has refused to meet its 2% of GDP spending obligation towards NATO. “It is actually offensive to assume that the U.S. taxpayer must continue to pay to have 50,000-plus Americans in Germany, but the Germans get to spend their surplus on domestic programs,” Grenell said. In June 2018, Trump announced that in 2017, the alliance countries invested more than $ 40 billion in NATO, but this is still not enough. In his view, Europe benefits more from the existence of NATO than the United States, while paying less for its security than the United States. Trump insists on increasing NATO’s budget to 2% of the member countries’  GDP. In 2017, only five of the 28 member states of the bloc complied with this level of spending: the USA, Great Britain, Greece, Poland, and Estonia. News