This is hardly the biggest of Donald Trump's whoppers last night, but I've grown weary of his ceaseless claims that he successfully bullied NATO countries to spend more on defense. What really happened is that in 2014—under President Obama—NATO members recommitted themselves to spending 2% of GDP on defense. This was spurred by Russia's invasion of Crimea that year. Here's how that went:
Biden was far more successful than Trump at getting Europe to pony up more money. However, this is just a simple average, not weighted for country size. So let's take a look in dollars:
Same thing. NATO defense spending increased far more under Biden than Trump.
Now, if you want to argue that recent spending has finally hit the 2% goal because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that's fine. I'm not demanding that you give Biden all the credit for this. But Trump? He accomplished very little, despite all his blathering and threats.
Putin probably had more to do with it than Biden. There appears to be a slight inflection beginning in early 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Respectfully, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, rather than anything done by Joe Biden is likely the driver of most of the recent NATO spending increases.
probably, but different counties saw very steep increases at different times, and not just after Feb 22
https://apnews.com/article/nato-defense-spending-stoltenberg-biden-5246409eec70745e6e936d997073a6f4
Well, haven't we all decided that Joe Biden is personally responsible for the Russian liberation of Ukraine? Didn't Once and Future President Trump declare it so, when he resoundingly won the debate Thursday?
I just hope I'm kidding.
What pisses me off isn't whether or not NATO members are spending the minimum level of their GDP on the military.
What pisses me off is that Trump keeps claiming that this money is going to NATO and that NATO members hadn't been paying their dues. That's offensively stupid. The 2% of GDP is not a direct contribution. The direct contribution is broken up into % of the total budget of NATO (US = 15.88%, Germany = 15.88%, UK = 10.96%, etc.) and that is what they have to pay for NATO to operate.
And the point of the minimum 2% military expenditures is to ensure NATO members are adequately prepared (through training, force level, arms, and equipment) at any time to mobilize.
One can be forgiven for believing that 2% was unnecessary during peacetime. When Putin invaded Ukraine for the second time, it was clear to all NATO members that war is coming.
Look if a member at Mar-a-Lago doesn't pay his dues, he can't come into the club anymore! NATO should work the same way! It's a straightforward business matter, which is why America needs a businessman like President Trump in the CEO's office.
I'm assuming snark. I hope.
Trump is an example of the long time Republican thing about bringing business ethics to the government. There is however no such thing as business ethics, particularly when the business is basically a small family owned and run one.
That one has bothered me for a long time, too. I honestly can't tell if he truly doesn't know the difference. (Although if he did, he wouldn't care.)
Given that he still doesn’t understand how tariffs work I’m gonna assume he doesn’t know and doesn’t care
Which is probably a safe assumption to start with whenever he says anything
How is revealing that the Russian army is an ineffective joke an excuse to spend more on your own military? That is just completely illogical.
The Convicted Felon always expresses this NATO requirement (suggestion?) as if the money is going directly into his own pocket. Which he may very well believe it should. For a so-called businessman, he has a weird idea of the whole "money" thing.
I seem to recall that during the debate Biden claimed that other countries are contributing as much to Ukraine as the US, and Trump claimed that the US was spending far more. It would be nice to see those numbers (although, since most of the assistance is in materiel rather than cash, valuation might be approximate).
US has spent/committed around $175B and the EU roughly $110B, though much of this is about accounting.
Sorry, but you are completely full of crap. Europe has spent nearly double on the Ukraine than the US. https://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-us-aid-going-ukraine
I chose my words very carefully. Maybe you might want to reexamine them.
Trump, as always, is a dishonorable lying sack of excrment. European countries have always been spending far more on Ukraine than the US.
Everyone forgets that the 2% target was to be met by 2025, not immediately. See https://x.com/NGrossman81/status/1757140078269194278 for more details.
NATO members committed orally to the 2% under Bill Clinton. In writing under GWBush. REpromised to do it under Obama. They never meant it, it was just a way of placating every US president since they all have complained about NATO not spending enough. Though now all the countries that could be attacked by Russia exceed the 2% number. (Hence Trump's claim that the US won't come to the aid of any NATO ally not spending 2% is doubly stupid.)
Did Kevin remember to normalize for the number of countries in Nato or only do the data for the countries continuously in NATO. (And normalizing wouldn;t actually solve the problem since Finland and Sweden being outside the NATO umbrella always spent more than their NATO neighbors.
Undecided Voters Say They Now Support Joe Biden After Debate,
https://www.newsweek.com/latino-voters-donald-trump-joe-biden-debate-election-1918795
Latino voters! We clearly need more of them! Something is seriously broken in the maga-midwest.
A lot of the Midwest has a serious immigration problem --that is, people immigrating out of it, and leaving behind people who project their own sense of loss into a national crisis.
I think that the risk of Trump’s return, coupled with the lessons of Ukraine (Russia is an unreliable partner; the US is an unreliable partner; ground warfare matters; manufacturing matters; most of Europe’s military is unready for serious conflict) is serving as a wake-up call in Europe. I expect higher military budgets and increasing tales of how difficult countries are finding it to fill the ranks. I don’t claim to have a crystal ball, but I fear our long holiday from history is drawing to a close.
Nobody actually cares about the details of this one, its just another item in the performative, aggressive grievance culture. Nobody cared before trumped shrieked about it years ago, nobody cares today. Sure, people will bring it up in their long list of grievances, but its easily discarded and replaced with whatever the new grievance of the moment is.
The list of grievances and whining about it is the point. The items on the list dont matter.
As a European, I've always been offended by US allegations that we were piggybacking on them in defense matters. We never asked you to spend trillions on it. And many of us saw through the propaganda, such as that the Soviets had more tanks. They did, but of lower quality which was the whole reason. They knew what equal numbers of weapons meant: the Germans had blown them away. When the USSR dissolved, a new enemy had to be found and now the US was spending trillions against... bad little Al Qaeda.
Now we're increasing defense spending because of Russia, nothing else. The political power of your lying and corrupt military-industrial complex is not our problem, or shouldn't be. There's no reason the safest country in the world should be spending so much money on "defense", and it certainly is not out of a deep love for Silesia.