Just fucking insane...

Trump says U.S. ties to NATO ‘very strong’

By LOUIS NELSON

President Donald Trump praised NATO on Thursday for making “tremendous progress” toward increasing the defense spending of member states, claiming victory after a contentious two days of meetings with leaders from members of the mutual-defense organization.

“The United States commitment to NATO is very strong, remains very strong, but primarily because everyone, the spirit they have, the amount of money they’re willing to spend, the additional money that they will be putting up has been really amazing to see it. To see the level of spirit in that room is incredible,” Trump told reporters at a press conference in Brussels on Thursday.

The Associated Press reported shortly after the press conference ended that French President Emmanuel Macron denied Trump’s claim that NATO allies have agreed to boost defense spending beyond previous targets.

“There is a communique that was published yesterday,” Macron said. “It’s very detailed. It confirms the goal of 2 percent by 2024. That’s all.”

Trump said NATO leaders had agreed to collectively increase their defense spending by at least $33 billion, apparently satisfying his demand that nations not only spend more on their own defense but ramp up that spending quicker than they had previously agreed to. Trump has long complained that the U.S. carries too much of the burden at NATO and that just a handful of nations spend the agreed-upon 2 percent of their respective gross domestic products on defense.

Earlier Thursday, Trump suggested he would pull the U.S. out of NATO if member-states did not immediately up their spending to 2 percent, according to NATO officials and diplomats, prompting an emergency meeting of the organization's world leaders.

But Macron denied that Trump threatened to withdraw the U.S. from the NATO alliance in a dispute over funding, according to the AP. He said the leaders of the alliance’s 29 members met in a session Thursday morning at the request of NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

The president spent much of this week’s NATO summit harping on the spending issue, targeting Germany in particular not only for its relatively low defense spending but also for an energy deal it struck with Russia, an agreement Trump said put the German government under the control of the Kremlin.

But with the meeting wrapping up Thursday, Trump celebrated the progress he said NATO had made and said he had “no problem” with the organization when asked if his threat to pull the U.S. from it remained on the table.

“I think that NATO is much stronger now than it was two days ago,” he said. “I think that NATO was not doing what they were supposed to be doing, a lot of the countries and we were doing much more than we should have been doing. Frankly, we were carrying too much of a burden. That’s why we call it burden sharing. I was using the term a lot today, burden sharing. We had a fantastic meeting at the end, 29 countries, and they are putting up a lot. Germany has increased very substantially, their time period and Germany’s coming along.”