BRUSSELS (AP) — NATO’s chief says U.S. allies are projected to spend around $12 billion more on defense this year, after President Donald Trump berated them for failing to boost military budgets.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday that “we have really shifted gears. The (spending) trend is up and we intend to keep it up.”
Unveiling new figures, Stoltenberg said European allies and Canada have increased spending by almost $46 billion over the last three years.
He said 25 of NATO’s 29 allies aim to raise defense spending in 2017.
Only the United States, Britain, Estonia, debt-burden Greece and Poland met NATO’s spending targets last year. Romania says it will meet the 2 percent of GDP guideline this year, while Latvia and Lithuania plan to in 2018.
Translation- “We can’t count on the US as long as an erratic, narcissistic, sociopathic, man-child is President.”
$12 billion is chickenfeed, in the scheme of things. You don’t destabilize the world peace in order to get your allies to pay for a couple of aircraft carriers.
Well its still under the cost of the last aircraft carrier the US launched.
And it will pay for a lot of tanks, grunts, helicopters and short and medium range rockets, all of which will be needed in the North-Eastern European Theatre (think Baltic States/Poland v Kalingrad this summer if Putin decides to go forego his summer holiday for another bogus land-grabbing “repatriation”).
AP has its usual problems with causality.
“NATO’s chief says U.S. allies are projected to spend around $12 billion more on defense this year, after President Donald Trump berated them for failing to boost military budgets.”
As if his outburst had anything to do with it, noting that two sentences down we see that this is a bit LESS than the average annual increase in spending over the preceding three years as the members move towards their 2024 targets.