One of Donald Trump’s favorite talking points is that our NATO allies have been “delinquent” in their financial commitments. That’s always been wrong — it reflects fundamental confusion about how the alliance works — and Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) pressed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about this on Wednesday.
“That’s a misnomer, is it not?” Corker asked, referring to the president’s rhetoric. Pompeo conceded, “That’s correct.”
It was a memorable moment: the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the president’s secretary of State agreed publicly that a frequent Trump claim about NATO is just wrong.
The trouble is, the president can’t seem to stop saying false things about NATO. The Independent, a British outlet, took note of Trump’s remarks yesterday to steelworkers in Illinois, where he complained bitterly about the alliance at a speech that wasn’t supposed to have anything to do with foreign policy. After repeating the bogus “delinquent” line about NATO members — he apparently missed the Pompeo testimony — Trump just kept going.
In remarks that will once more raise questions about his commitment to the treaty, he said: “The one thing I know about NATO, for sure, is it’s better for Europe than it is for us.” […]
“Well, let me just tell you what happened with NATO. Last year they paid $44 billion more than they ever paid before. And, if you look at NATO, it was going this way, it was going down. Everybody was delinquent. They were…not everybody but almost everybody. The United States wasn’t. By the way, Germany pays one percent [of its GDP] and we pay 4.3 percent. You think that’s good?”
There are three broad problems with this anti-NATO barrage. The first is that Trump was wrong about practically every detail. The increased expenditure aren’t $44 billion (it’s $41 billion); investments weren’t “going down” (they’ve climbed every year since 2014); no one was “delinquent” (that’s not how NATO works); and we don’t spent 4.3% of GDP on defense (it’s 3.5%).









