Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump spurred international alarm when he said he would 'encourage' Russia to '
In 2014, following Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, North Atlantic Treaty Organization members agreed to spend 2% of their national gross domestic product on defense spending by 2024. Spending has increased since then.
As of 2023, 11 countries met that goal. Experts said Russia President Vladimir Putin’s actions in 2014 and 2022 in Ukraine spurred the defense spending increases.Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump spurred international alarm when he said he would"encourage" Russia to"do whatever the hell they want" to a NATO member country that didn’t"pay" for collective defense.Feb. 10 at a Conway, South Carolina, rally as he described a conversation with an unnamed NATO country leader during his presidency. Trump used the story to claim that he was tough on NATO and got results, misrepresenting several facts about the alliance and his record in the process. "I got them to pay up," Trump said."NATO was busted until I came along. I said, ’Everybody’s gonna pay.’ They said, ‘Well, if we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They couldn't believe the answer, and you never saw more money pour in."We can’t fact-check whether that conversation happened, but we can examine how and why European defense spending changed under Trump ."Countries falling short will have weaker defenses than we would like, but they are not delinquent," said Stephen Saideman, a professor at Carleton University's Norman Paterson School of International Affairs., president of the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs, and a U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO during part of the Obama administration."Not Donald Trump."that Trump pressed NATO partners aggressively to increase military spending,"but he didn’t say anything about not defending anybody against Russia."NATO, formally the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was created in 1949 to provide collective security against the Soviet Union. The alliance has 31 The alliance agreed that an armed attack against one or more of them would constitute an attack against them all, and each member would take action, including armed force. NATO countries do not pay money into a broad NATO defense budget; each country determines its own level of military spending.The agreement was aspirational, not binding. Countries are not"delinquent" if they’ve missed that target. "They're welching on a commitment, but there is no enforcement mechanism," said Justin Logan, Cato Institute director of defense and foreign policy studies. The 2% target is"about each country investing in their own defense so that the alliance as a whole could be stronger, better able to deter or defeat various threats ," Saideman said.NATO defense spending has been increasing since the 2014 Crimea annexation, and spending accelerated after Russia further invaded Ukraine in 2022, Jeremy Shapiro, the European Council on Foreign Relations’ research director, told PolitiFact. Justin Logan, the Cato Institute’s defense and foreign policy studies director, said Russia’s attacks and Trump’s statements affected the allies’ spending decisions. "Poland’s skyrocketing spending, for instance, has everything to do with fear of Russia," Logan said. Poland increased its defense spending as a share of GDP from about 2.4% in 2022 to 3.9% in 2023.that 11 countries met the 2% GDP goal: Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, the Slovak Republic, the United Kingdom and the United States."Politically, meeting the 2% level keeps your country out of the spotlight and in a general state of political grace," Logan said,"which is why so many tiny and vulnerable East European countries do so."Many of the members meeting the target — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia — offer almost no usable military power. "France and Turkey, which don’t meet the 2% standard, have far more firepower than most of those who meet the standard," Logan said."It is impossible to say whether Trump’s threats had more of an impact than Obama and Biden’s appeals to solidarity," Shapiro said.,"We’re going to be building on that momentum, from working to ensure that Allies spend enough on the defense, the 2 percent — not just as a hike, but that’s the bottom line." Every American president since Harry S. Truman urged European allies to do more, Daalder wrote."Trump was hardly the first. Nor the last."Email interview, Jeremy Shapiro, research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. Feb. 12, 2024 Email interview, Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, Feb. 12, 2024Biden’s strategy is to “get as many illegals in the country as possible” and “legalize them to create a permanent majority.”“That’s why they are allowing these people to come in — people that don’t speak our language — they are signing them up to vote.” "In actuality, there is no evidence Joe Biden won” the 2020 election, citing a report’s allegations from five battleground states. “Almost a million people, mostly Democrats, have been kicked off the voter roll here in Florida” because of efforts to place a proposed amendment on abortion access on the state’s 2024 ballot.In Florida, “any woman who has an abortion after six weeks — and any doctor who gives her care — will be guilty of a felony.” En una entrevista con Tucker Carlson, el presidente ruso Vladimir Putin dijo que el tema de la frontera sur de Estados Unidos le parece"irónicamente divertido".
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