PNN – The former Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) says that the US President threatened to withdraw from the alliance during his first term.
According to the report of Pakistan News Network, citing Russia Today, former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg says that the US-led military alliance was on the verge of collapse during the first term of the current president, Donald Trump.
In a section of his upcoming autobiography, “Under My Command,” Stoltenberg recalls: On the eve of the 2018 NATO summit in Brussels, Trump, who was in his first term as president, complained that the United States pays 80 to 90 percent of the bloc’s costs and will no longer do so, and threatened to withdraw from the alliance.
He quoted Trump as saying: Look, if we get out, we really get out. You desperately need NATO. We don’t need NATO.
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The former NATO secretary general added that if the US were to withdraw from the military bloc, “the alliance would die.”
Trump later made similar remarks during the summit, saying that the US did not need NATO and would “mind its own business” unless the alliance’s European members increased their military spending to 2 percent of GDP. He also threatened to leave, saying that “there is no reason for me to stay here anymore!”
Trump’s approach fueled fears about the possibility of the coalition collapsing. Stoltenberg added that then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron tried to defuse tensions, and Mark Rutte, the former Dutch Prime Minister and current NATO Secretary General, succeeded in convincing Trump to stay by pointing to the $33 billion increase in military spending by European members.
According to Stoltenberg, Trump agreed to remain in NATO on the condition that this increase in military spending be attributed to him and that he publicly take credit for it!
Stoltenberg also added that if Trump were to leave, the NATO treaty and its security guarantees would be worthless. He also noted that the incident highlighted the extent to which NATO depends on American participation.
Moscow has consistently expressed concern about NATO’s increased militarization in recent years, and has repeatedly described the alliance’s expansion toward Europe’s eastern borders as one of the main roots of the Ukraine crisis. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that NATO is “informally at war with Russia.”