Trump attacks French leader over NATO criticism

LONDON (AP):

United states President Donald Trump on Tuesday took aim at President Emmanuel Macron over the French leader’s criticism of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and criticised the other members of the military alliance for being too slow to beef up their defence budgets.

As prime ministers and presidents of the 29-member alliance converged on London to mark NATO’s 70th birthday, Trump told reporters Macron’s comments were “very, very nasty” when he lamented the “brain death” of the organisation owing in large part to a lack of US leadership.

“I think that’s insulting to a lot of different forces,” Trump said. “You just can’t go around making statements like that about NATO. It’s very disrespectful.”

During campaigning for the last election, Trump described NATO as “obsolete”. He has since tempered his criticism somewhat.

Macron was angered when Trump unilaterally pulled troops out of northern Syria last month, a move that Turkey saw as a green light for an invasion. The European Union is mired in a political crisis sparked by its inability to manage Syrian refugee arrivals and fears that more people might flee.

Relations between the US and France are also particularly strained this week after the US Trade Representative proposed introducing tariffs on US$2.4 billion in goods in retaliation for a French tax on global tech giants. Trump and Macron are due to meet on the sidelines of the summit.

Discussing military funding, Trump insisted that “a lot of countries haven’t paid”.

After Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, NATO countries halted their post-Cold War spending cuts and began increasing spending. They pledged to “move towards” spending two per cent of gross domestic product on their national defense budgets by 2024.

“You could make the case that they’ve been delinquent for 25-30 years,” Trump said after talks with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. He added that the figure of two per cent “is a very low number, it really should be four”.

Stoltenberg, given the unenviable task of trying to hold NATO together as its leaders take pot shots at each other, said that “we’re doing more together, North America and Europe, than we have done in many decades”.

But even he conceded that “we should never question the unity and the political willingness to stand together and to defend each other. The whole purpose of NATO is to preserve peace. It’s to prevent conflict by sending a clear message to any potential adversary that if one ally is attacked, it will trigger a response from the whole alliance”.

The spats between leaders threaten to expose a lack of unity that could undermine the military organisation’s credibility.

Macron insisted ahead of the meeting that the endless spending debate should be set aside so that NATO can focus on important strategic questions like who its enemies really are, how to improve ties with Russia, and what to do with an unpredictable ally like Turkey. In turn, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan lashed out at Macron.

Ankara raised the ire of its allies by invading northern Syria and for buying Russian air-­defence systems with powerful computers aboard that suck up data and would compromise the military equipment of allies if they were stationed nearby.

Before heading to London, Erdogan suggested that Turkey might not back Poland and NATO’s Baltic allies – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – should they require defending unless the allies support Turkish concerns about Syrian Kurdish fighters, which Ankara sees as terrorists.