Donald Trump sharpened his attack on NATO on Thursday morning, saying the United States spends more money on the alliance than any other country and gets nothing back for it. He called the arrangement “ridiculous,” a familiar charge delivered at a moment when allies are trying to keep the summit in Ankara from turning into another argument over who pays.
The timing matters because the NATO summit is next week in Ankara, Turkey, and Trump is once again pressing the same grievance just as NATO’s 31 members are expected to show they can still hold together. He wrote on Truth Social that the United States spends more money on NATO than any other country, by far, to protect the others, “without getting any benefit from so doing.”
That complaint lands after allies already agreed last year at The Hague to raise defense spending to 5 percent of GDP by 2035. It is a pledge designed to answer the burden-sharing fight Trump has kept alive for years, but it has not stopped him from returning to the same language as the summit approaches. He also joked last week that he was only going because of his affinity for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, while NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who has spent much of his energy managing and mollifying Trump, answered from the Oval Office: “You would have come for me.”
The clash is not about whether NATO members have made a promise; it is about whether that promise is enough to satisfy Trump now. Retired Gen. Richard Shirreff, who served as NATO’s deputy supreme allied commander Europe from 2011 to 2014, said he expected “more of the same from last year,” and that is the problem for allies: they have already agreed to a new spending target, yet Trump is still signaling that he wants the argument on his terms. For European members and Canada, the question is whether Ankara becomes a summit about alliance unity or another round of damage control before the talks even begin.
What happens next is straightforward. Trump and the other NATO leaders are due in Ankara next week, and the real test will be whether his criticism turns into a demand for something sharper than last year’s spending pledge, or whether the summit settles for repeating the same promises in a louder room.
