Trump Said He Is Not Going to Withdraw the United States from NATO

He also noted that thanks to his actions, eight NATO countries are fulfilling obligations, spending at least 2% of GDP on defense US President Donald Trump does not want the United States to leave NATO. The head of the Washington administration said this in an interview published on Friday by Mark Thyssen, a columnist of The Washington Post and Fox and a researcher at the conservative American entrepreneurial institute. “No, I don’t want to leave,” said the owner of the White House. “But I want them (other NATO countries – TASS) to pay their fair share,” Trump added. In an interview, the US president spoke about the steps he took to counter Russia. Among these, he attributed his efforts to persuade US allies in NATO to increase funding for the alliance. He also noted that thanks to his actions, eight NATO countries are fulfilling their obligations, spending at least 2% of GDP on defense needs. “But, by the way, 2% is too little. <...> I had those who paid almost nothing, but now they are paying. And they asked me an important question: “Would you leave <...>? And I replied: “Yes, I would leave.” And if you do not give that answer, they’re not going to pay,” Trump explained. Trump’s National Security ex-adviser John Bolton writes in a book on sale in June that Trump wanted to threaten NATO leaders to leave the alliance at the 2018 summit if they supported the Russian Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project. According to Bolton, in the end, he and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo managed to convince Trump not to state such threats, but perhaps urging the NATO member-countries to increase defense spending. NATO countries, under US pressure and under the pretext of a “Russian threat”, adopted at the Wales summit in September 2014 a legally binding requirement to increase their military spending to 2% of GDP by 2024. To justify this requirement, Washington uses a political argument about the need for a more balanced distribution of defense spending between the United States, which accounts for about 70% of all NATO military spending, and the rest of the alliance. The United States requires that at least 30% of all defense spending of European countries go to the purchase of new weapons, supplied to NATO mainly by the US military-industrial complex.