President Donald Trump's demand that NATO countries increase their defense spending to 5% of their GDP appears to be a rule for other countries and not the United States.
The comments come at a time when Trump is scheduled to meet with NATO allies next week in The Hague. Spain's prime minister recently said his country won't abide by the spending increase and asked for an exemption.
“I don’t think we should, but I think they should,” he said during a news conference in Morristown, New Jersey, on Friday.
“We’ve been supporting NATO so long…So I don’t think we should, but I think that the NATO countries should, absolutely,” Trump continued.
Trump has long tried to get NATO countries to increase their defense spending to 5% of GDP. NATO chief Mark Rutte said recently that all NATO countries will meet the current 2% goal this year, and many have a plan to increase that spending to 3.5% by 2030.
Currently, the United States spends about 3.4% of its GDP on NATO defense, according to data from the alliance.
There are only four countries that currently meet the 5% defense spending target. Those are Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
The proposed increase in defense spending has also become a point of contention among the 32 NATO countries.
"We have to find a realistic compromise between what is necessary and what is possible, really, to spend,” Germany’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius, told The New York Times earlier this month.
