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http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trump-nato-allies-delinquent-military-spending-1.4742588

Trump says NATO allies like Canada are 'delinquent' on military spending. Is he wrong?

'We're the schmucks that are paying for the whole thing,' President Trump says

John Paul Tasker· CBC News· Posted: Jul 11, 2018 6:10 PM ET






  
Garry Moore





https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-trump-nato-brussels-1.4741585

Trudeau and Trump talk trade on NATO sidelines

Relations between Canada and the U.S. tense amid tariff war

Murray Brewster· CBC News· Posted: Jul 11, 2018 4:00 AM ET





 
Paul Cooper






 
Emmanuel Rochon








George Abbott







Erin Wilson


YUP





 
Allan Campbell







Dale Sullivan








Kathy Altenhofen







 
Richard Dunphy




 
Kevin Delaney







Ian MacDonald






http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-nato-1.4741923

Trump suggests NATO allies could double defence spending beyond 2014 pledge

U.S. leader kicks off 2-day summit by accusing Germany of being a 'captive of Russia' over energy deal

 
Kevin Graves (AKA Jaspersdad)








 
Kevin Graves (AKA Jaspersdad)








 
Neil Austen






 
Kate Ferguson






 
Marc Belanger






 
Kimmy Smith






 
Francis Lee







 
William Perry







Thomas Magnum









Ken MacDonald

Trump says NATO allies like Canada are 'delinquent' on military spending. Is he wrong?

'We're the schmucks that are paying for the whole thing,' President Trump says

John Paul Tasker· CBC News· Posted: Jul 11, 2018 6:10 PM ET

Last Updated: an hour ago
U.S. President Donald Trump checks his watch prior to a dinner with leaders at the NATO summit in Brussels. Trump says NATO allies need to spend more on defence. (Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP Photo)



U.S. President Donald Trump ramped up his rhetoric on defence spending Wednesday, urging NATO countries to meet lofty spending targets immediately or risk being branded as "delinquent."

At the core of his criticism of the multilateral alliance is the argument that the U.S. foots the bill for far too much of the alliance's defence capacity, and other member nations — including Canada — are "freeloaders" for failing to contribute their fair share of domestic military spending.

"We're the schmucks that are paying for the whole thing," Trump said at a recent rally.

"Frankly, many countries owe us a tremendous amount of money for many years back, where they're delinquent, as far as I'm concerned, because the United States has had to pay for them."

Trump previously has told allies that if they don't meet higher spending targets, they should leave the alliance and go it alone on military matters.

The president's pointed language might be off-putting for some Canadian observers — but is he right to call Canada a parsimonious defence partner?

"Yes, I think Trump has a point in that defence expenditure is a burden predominately carried by the U.S. The U.S. carries the load," Colin Robertson, a former top diplomat and the vice-president of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, said in an interview with CBC News.

"We've got to do more. We can't expect the American public to pay all the costs of this alliance."
NATO is the central pillar of Euro-Atlantic defence and the cornerstone of Canadian defence and security policy — which is why Canada should contribute more, Robertson said.

"But Trump puts people off. Nobody likes a bully. When a bully tells you to do something, you usually tell him to f-off. It makes it hard for Trudeau to do something because a certain group of Canadians will be saying, 'Oh you're just kowtowing to Trump,'" he added.

"Canadian prime ministers have always been careful to keep a distance from their American counterparts ... but the bottom line is you do have to look at dollars because dollars do talk."

He said Canada should spend more on defence not merely to please Trump — who will just "take, take, take"— but also to serve our own national interests by increasing troop levels, replacing aging equipment, protecting Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic and taking part in humanitarian missions abroad.

Obama and Trump on the same page

European — and Canadian — military budgets have increased over the last two years, something Trump prodded NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg to give him credit for on Wednesday.

But NATO spending is an old obsession of American presidents. Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama, also chastised "free riders" for failing to spend a long-held target of two per cent of their national gross domestic products on the military.

Obama suggested the United Kingdom's reluctance to increase its defence spending could threaten its "special relationship" with the United States.

Obama even called out Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the issue when he addressed Parliament in June 2016. "The world needs more Canada. NATO needs more Canada. We need you."

00:0001:21

U.S. leaders have long looked with envy at the relatively low defence spending levels of other NATO countries as the Pentagon's budget continues to swell.

Canada signed on to an agreement to move "toward" the two per cent spending target at the 2014 NATO summit in Wales — a commitment that would cost Canadian taxpayers billions of dollars — to satisfy U.S. and NATO demands.

Canada's current spending comes in at just over one per cent of GDP — roughly $20 billion a year — a figure that many argue is simply too low to sustain a modern fighting force.

Others say quality is just as important as quantity. Trudeau has said that the two per cent benchmark doesn't adequately address the totality of a country's commitment to the alliance.

"I think the two per cent metric is an easy shorthand ... it is a very specific and, to a certain extent, limited tool,'' Trudeau said Tuesday after meeting with Canadian soldiers taking part in a NATO mission in Latvia.

Liberal B.C. MP Stephen Fuhr is the chair of the House of Commons defence committee, which recently completed a study of Canada's relationship with NATO. He said Canada shouldn't ignore the "aspirational" two per cent target entirely, but there are other ways to assess its contribution.

"I understand the need to have a number there, you need to put a stake in the sand somewhere, but it doesn't tell the whole picture. There are better ways to assess who is actually contributing," the former fighter pilot said in an interview with CBC News on Wednesday.

"Greece maybe spends more than us, but does Greece show up every time? Is Greece investing in the capabilities that NATO actually needs? That matters."

(Almost three quarters of Greece's budget goes to paying salaries and pensions. In a country where unemployment is rampant, a career in the Greek military is highly sought-after. The Mediterranean country fails to meet other NATO spending targets for major equipment purchases, for example.)

"Every time there is a NATO mission, Canada looks at it and decides whether it's in the national interest to participate, and we have every time," Fuhr added.

"It's all about capability. The bigger question is, is Canada delivering? And I think the answer to that question is yes, including in Latvia, big time. Our history has shown that you can count on Canada to show up and pull its weight most of the time. The two per cent is just one of the ways you can look at it."

Fuhr noted that the government's defence strategy — a policy called Strong, Secure, Engaged, which was unveiled last year — includes a commitment to spend $47 billion in new money over 20 years, which will move Canada marginally higher up the list to about 1.45 per cent of GDP.

"That's a lot of money to put into the military. We're moving in the right direction," he said.
Robertson said he has sympathy for the government's argument.

While Canada spends less than some, it has the best equipment interoperability in the alliance — meaning it's a reliable partner for the U.S. on missions abroad, he said.

00:0001:40

Only six of the 29 nations in the alliance can fully integrate with the U.S. in the air, on land, at sea and with the special forces.

A recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a leading Washington-based think tank, also sought to challenge the tunnel-vision focus on the two per cent target. The report, Counting Dollars or Measuring Value, suggested putting a greater emphasis on resources specifically "employed in the service of allied security" would be more useful.

"The almost singular focus on meeting the NATO pledge of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence obscures many of the true challenges to growing national and collective capability and to strengthened transatlantic security," the report reads.

Based on the think-tank's own assessment, Canada ranks fourth overall in NATO in terms of total commitment when you include troop levels on deployments to NATO missions, aid to support security operations abroad and the willingness of NATO members to accept refugees from conflict zones, among other benchmarks.

Conflating military spending with NATO commitments

Robertson said Trump also has conflated two issues central to the NATO spending debate. First, he said, the president's claim that the U.S. is "spending far more on NATO" than its allies is misleading.

00:0001:31

A country's total military spending includes its NATO responsibilities and everything else its military does, he said. According to the recent Commons report, Canada currently provides about 6.6 per cent of NATO's common-funded budgets, making it the sixth-largest financial contributor to that budget among the member states.

That's not to mention the 435 Canadian civilian and military personnel currently working in the NATO bureaucracy, a number that does not include personnel deployed to NATO operations or staff working within various NATO support agencies.

Several Canadians are also serving in high-ranking leadership positions within NATO, including Lt.-Gen. Christine Whitecross, the commandant of the NATO Defense College in Rome, and Lt.-Gen. Christian Juneau, who is the deputy commander of the Joint Forces Command in Naples.
 

Trump suggests NATO allies could double defence spending beyond 2014 pledge

U.S. leader kicks off 2-day summit by accusing Germany of being a 'captive of Russia' over energy deal

Combative Trump accuses Germany of pandering to Russia for energy

00:0003:21

'Germany is a captive of Russia,' says U.S. president at start of NATO meetings 3:21


U.S. President Donald Trump barrelled into a NATO summit Wednesday with claims that a natural gas pipeline deal has left Germany "totally controlled" and "captive to Russia" as he lobbed fresh complaints about allies'"delinquent" defence spending during the opening of what was expected to be a fraught two-day meeting.

Trump also suggested that NATO allies commit to spending four per cent of their gross domestic product on defence — double the current goal of two per cent by 2024.

The president, in a testy exchange with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg that kicked off his visit, took issue with the U.S. protecting Germany as it strikes deals with Russia.
"I have to say, I think it's very sad when Germany makes a massive oil and gas deal with Russia where we're supposed to be guarding against Russia," Trump said at a breakfast with Stoltenberg. "We're supposed to protect you against Russia but they're paying billions of dollars to Russia and I think that's very inappropriate."

Trump repeatedly described Germany as "captive to Russia" because of the energy deal and urged NATO to look into the issue.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel pushed back firmly, insisting that Germany makes its own decisions and drawing on her own background growing up in communist East Germany behind the Iron Curtain.

"I've experienced myself a part of Germany controlled by the Soviet Union and I'm very happy today that we are united in freedom as the Federal Republic of Germany and can thus say that we can determine our own policies and make our own decisions and that's very good," she said.

The president appeared to be referring to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that would bring gas from Russia to Germany's northeastern Baltic coast, bypassing Eastern European nations like Poland and Ukraine and doubling the amount of gas Russia can send directly to Germany. The vast undersea pipeline is opposed by the U.S. and some other EU members, who warn it could give Moscow greater leverage over Western Europe. It's expected to be online at the end of 2019.
Environmental-conscious Germany is trying to reduce its reliance on coal and is phasing out nuclear power by 2022, so it hopes to use natural gas to partially fill the gap until the country's electricity grid can cope with fluctuating levels provided by renewable energy. The alternatives, including U.S. supplies, are more expensive.

In their back-and-forth, Stoltenberg stressed to Trump that NATO members have been able to work together despite their differences. "I think that two world wars and the Cold War taught us that we are stronger together than apart," he told the president, trying to calm tensions.

'They will spend more'

Trump's dramatic exchange with Stoltenberg set the tone for what was already expected to be a tense day of meetings with leaders of the military alliance as Trump presses jittery NATO allies about their military spending ahead of his meeting next week with Putin.

"The United States is paying far too much and other countries are not paying enough, especially some. So we're going to have a meeting on that," Trump said, describing the situation as "disproportionate and not fair to the taxpayers of the United States."

"They will spend more," he later predicted. "I have great confidence they'll be spending more."
And with that, he went on to push allies at the summit to double their commitment on defence spending.
 
"During the president's remarks today at the NATO summit, he suggested that countries not only meet their commitment of two per cent of their GDP on defence spending, but that they increase it to four per cent," said White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders.

She said the president raised the same issue at NATO last year and that, "Trump wants to see our allies share more of the burden and at a very minimum meet their already stated obligations."
However, a formal summit declaration issued by the NATO leaders Wednesday reaffirmed their "unwavering commitment" to the two per cent pledge set in 2014 and made no reference to any effort to get to four per cent.

Trump's pipeline criticism was an unusual line of attack for a president who has proclaimed himself eager to improve relations with Russia's Vladimir Putin and dismissed the U.S. intelligence community's assessment that Russia tried to undermine Western democracy by meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to help Trump win. Trump has long argued that improving relations with Russia would be good for both nations.

Mixed reaction in U.S. 

Back in the U.S., Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer issued a joint statement describing Trump's "brazen insults and denigration of one of America's most steadfast allies, Germany," as "an embarrassment."

"His behaviour this morning is another profoundly disturbing signal that the president is more loyal to President Putin than to our NATO allies," they wrote.

Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch also took issue with Trump, saying "I don't agree with that. Germans wouldn't agree with that. They are a very strong people."
But Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas and a strong supporter of the president, said the pipeline issue strikes at the "heart of NATO unity."

"The pipeline gets cheap Russian gas to Germany while bypassing smaller Eastern European nations, allowing Russia to pressure them while Germany is held harmless," he tweeted, adding: "No amount of preening in Berlin will cover this nakedly selfish policy."

Despite Trump's claims about Germany, Merkel served as a forceful advocate for imposing — and maintaining — sanctions on Russia after it annexed Crimea in 2014, arguing that it violated the principles of the international order established after the Second World War.

The president is also not the first leader to point to the impact of Nord Stream 2 on Europe, echoing complaints from Eastern European allies who note it would cut out transit countries such as Poland and Ukraine.

Trump and Merkel met later Wednesday on the sidelines of the summit and kept their remarks polite during a photo opportunity with the press.

Trump told reporters the two had a "very, very good relationship" and congratulated Merkel on her "tremendous success." Asked if they had discussed the pipeline, he said they had, but declined to elaborate.

Merkel, for her part, called the two nations "good partners" and said "we wish to continue to co-operate in the future."

Trump then met with French President Emmanuel Macron, who said he disagreed with Trump's pipeline assessment. But the two appeared on good terms, with Trump joking about the fact that Macron had been asked about it.

Trump has long pushed NATO members to meet their agreed-to target of two per cent by 2024 and has accused those who don't of freeloading off the U.S.







NATO estimates that 15 members, or just over half, will meet the benchmark by 2024 based on current trends.

Brussels is the first leg of a weeklong European tour that will include stops in London and Scotland, as well as a highly anticipated meeting next week with Putin.

Trudeau and Trump talk trade on NATO sidelines

Relations between Canada and the U.S. tense amid tariff war

Murray Brewster· CBC News· Posted: Jul 11, 2018 4:00 AM ET



Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, middle, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, left, and Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland take part in North Atlantic Council Working Session at the NATO Summit in Brussels, Belgium on Wednesday, July 11, 2018. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)