MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 07th June, 2019) US President Donald Trump has suggested that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg could be his biggest admirer because of the United States' influence over the other NATO member states with regard to getting them to step up their contributions to the alliance's budget.
"NATO was going down, and if you look at the money coming into NATO for the last 15 years it is like an escalator down, and now it is like a rocket ship up. Secretary Stoltenberg has been maybe Trump's biggest fan, to be honest with you ... He made a speech the other day, he said without Donald Trump maybe there would be no NATO," Trump said in an interview with Fox news, published late on Thursday.
According to the US president, Washington finally made NATO members give more money to the alliance's defense budget, which has been disproportionately dependent on US contributions.
"We have gotten over a $100 billion from other countries where they are starting to pay, because it got to a point where we were paying so much, I think we were really paying close to a 100 percent of NATO. So we were paying to protect all of these European nations, and it is just not fair," Trump said.
Trump has repeatedly rebuked NATO members for freeloading off the United States and not making large enough contributions to the alliance's defense spending.
For the past eight years, the United States has been contributing at least 3.5 percent of its GDP to NATO's defense spending. Only two other members of the alliance, Greece and the United Kingdom, have been meeting NATO's recommended contribution of 2 percent.
Estonia, Latvia and Poland have met this goal occasionally between 2011 and 2018, while the rest of NATO has failed to do the same.
