Observations

President Trump uses shorthand to communicate to ordinary voters. His messages are often ridiculed by the mainstream media who prefer long and sophisticated arguments. These arguments often confuse the public, as they are intended to.

The flavour of the month is that President Trump doesn’t understand that NATO member countries do not “pay into NATO”, but invest in their defence spending which forms part of the overall defence capability of the Alliance. Of course he knows this.

Many of the articles on NATO in the mainstream media in recent days have been about the payments towards NATO’s administrative costs. These are minuscule in comparison with the real figures at debate.

NATO members are supposed to spend a minimum of 2% of their GDP on defence, and 20% of their total defence spend should be on equipment.

When the US President takes EU countries to task – especially the EU’s largest economy Germany – he is quite right to do so. And when he claims that these countries should be held responsible for their lack of expenditure on defence for decades, we agree.

In the last five years alone, the US spent 1.4 TRILLION dollars MORE than the NATO minimum. Germany spent $147 billion dollars LESS than the NATO minimum. We rest our case.

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