How Trump can make NATO great again

As NATO gathers for its 75th anniversary summit in Washington this week, President Biden is taking credit for the fact that European allies and Canada have increased defense spending by hundreds of billions of dollars and warning that, if elected, Donald Trump will “eviscerate NATO.”
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In fact, Trump, not Biden, is responsible for most of that spending increase. In 2006, allies pledged to spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense, but when Trump took office a decade later, only three were meeting their commitment, and spending by non-U.S. members had dropped to an all-time low of 1.4 percent in 2015. The situation was so bad that in Germany, NATO’s wealthiest European member, 60 percent of the country’s Eurofighter and Tornado fighter jets, 82 percent of its Sea Lynx helicopters, 61 percent of its main battle tanks, and all of its submarines or transport planes were unusable.

As president, Trump put Germany and the rest of NATO on notice: The United States would no longer tolerate their failure to contribute adequately to our common defense. And by the time he left office, allies were spending $130 billion more on defense than they did in 2016 and had pledged to increase that figure to $400 billion by the end of 2024.

Well, 2024 has arrived, and NATO data shows that non-U.S. members are projected to spend $510 billion more than they did in 2016 (excluding Finland and Sweden, which were not members in 2016 and whose entire defense budgets now count toward European totals).

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