Trump says US doesn’t have to meet NATO spending goal

President Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. shouldn’t have to abide by the same defense spending standards as the rest of NATO — potentially antagonizing leaders from the rest of the alliance days before he’s to meet with them in The Netherlands.

Trump has long demanded that NATO states spend 5 percent of their GDP on defense but has never said if the U.S. should be included in that or not. The U.S. is currently at 3.4 percent.

“I don’t think we should, but I think they should,” he said, responding to a question about his 5 percent defense spending goal.

“We’ve been supporting NATO so long. … So I don’t think we should, but I think that the NATO countries should, absolutely,” he added.

The summit kicks off Tuesday in The Hague with the leaders of 32 member states coming together to plan spending goals and reaffirm NATO force structure and deployment plans.

Most NATO states spend just over 2 percent of their GDP on defense currently, with a growing number having outlined plans to get to around 3 percent over the next year or two. Trump’s spending demand has hovered over the alliance since his reelection however, and the alliance has come up with a novel solution: Call for 3.5 percent on defense, with the remaining 1.5 percent taken up by domestic infrastructure and cybersecurity spending.

Trump’s apparent opting out of the higher target is unlikely to sit well with Republicans on Capitol Hill who’ve pushed for larger Pentagon budgets and have clashed with the administration over defense spending. Both Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the chairs of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees respectively, have been pushing to drive U.S. defense spending to 5 percent of GDP. They and other GOP leaders criticized Trump’s budget plans for keeping annual defense funding flat, save a one-time investment from Republicans’ megabill of spending and tax cuts.

Hitting that goal would mean a roughly $1.4 trillion defense budget for the Pentagon.

Only Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have committed to 5 percent number so far, but most of the rest of the alliance is expected to follow suit at The Hague.

There are outlines, however. The Spanish government, which is one of the lowest spenders on defense in the alliance, flatly rejected the 5 percent goal this week. In a letter to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte obtained by POLITICO, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said his government “cannot commit to a specific spending target in terms of GDP at this summit.”

Other allies who have spent more on defense in recent years are also grappling with how to keep pumping more money into their militaries. “We have to find a realistic compromise between what is necessary and what is possible, really, to spend,” Germany’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius said this month during a NATO meeting in Brussels.

Seth Jones, president of the defense and security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in a press call Friday that U.S. defense spending, at 3.4 percent of GDP, is “lower than during any time during the Cold War,” and the Trump administration’s defense budget as a percentage of GDP “is likely to be lower than the Carter administration’s defense budget in the 1970s.”

Connor O’Brien contributed to this report.