Why Is Trump Dissatisfied With Its NATO Partners?
The US President Donald Trump is full of willingness to reform NATO, and in particular, to distribute fairly the expanses within the military structure. This is reported by Die Welt newspaper, commenting on Trump's telephone conversation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
It should be noted that Donald Trump raised the same issue during the telephone conversation, which was also raised by former US presidents. It refers to insufficient military allocations by many NATO member countries, resulting in 75% of military spending within the bloc which falls on the United States.
NATO is format pf military-political cooperation, which was established in 1949. The alliance includes most European countries, USA and Canada.
Along with a number of regulations, the Alliance has also a funding regulatory provision. In particular, the military expenditure of the members of NATO should not be less than 2% of their GDP. Despite this provision, only three of the 25 NATO-member European countries do so - among them Great Britain, Greece and Estonia.
Thus, in 2013 the average amount of military expenditure in Europe amounted to 1.4% of GDP. This figure is due to the financial crisis in Europe.
As for the US role in NATO's military expenditure in the gross amount, from the years of 1995-2013 the figure reached from 59% to 72%.
In 2016, the military spending of 2% was fulfilled only by four European countries: the UK (60.3 billion dollars, 2.21% of GDP), Poland (9.3 billion dollars, 2% of GDP), Greece (4.5 billion dollars, 2.38% of GDP) and Estonia (479 million dollars, 2.16% of GDP).
It is noteworthy that 72% of NATO's military spending in 2016, that is more than 918.3 billion dollars, was contributed by the US again. It should be noted that this amount (3,61% of US GDP) exceeded even the Pentagon's annual budget, which amounted only to 580.3 billion dollars in 2016.
It is no coincidence that US President, as well as the former presidents, voiced this problem of the unequal distribution of military spending. The questioning sounds as follows: Is NATO's effectiveness equivalent to the amount paid by the US?
In fact, Donald Trump emphasis the problem of having insufficient or just a symbolic support of European countries towards NATO. Whether the US administration will force NATO to fulfill its commitments to its partners, time will show.
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