Eight years after Donald Trump used his first appearance at a NATO leaders summit to castigate members of the alliance for “not paying what they should be paying” for their own defense needs, the 32-member bloc is pledging to more than double their military budgeting commitments — and the American president is getting credit.
Speaking at the outset of the group’s annual confab at The Hague, Secretary General Mark Rutte said the alliance was poised to take “historic, transformational decisions to make our people safer, through a stronger, fairer and more lethal NATO” by implementing a “concrete plan” for each member of the alliance to spend a full five percent of gross domestic product on defense, through a combination of “core defense” and “defense and security-related investments.”
