Trump: Russia can ‘do whatever it wants’ with NATO countries that pay too little for defense | Abroad

“A president of a major country asked: if we don’t pay and we are attacked by Russia, would you protect us?” the Republican presidential candidate said in his speech in Conway, South Carolina, ahead of the state’s February 24 Republican primary. “You don’t pay, you default, let’s say that happens. No, I wouldn’t protect you. In fact, I would them [Rusland, red.] encourage them to do what they want.”

It is unclear who would have asked Trump that question and in what context; The Republican presidential candidate did not go into detail about this.

The statements immediately caused consternation among opponents of the former president, who warned that Trump would give Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which is still embroiled in an exhausting war in Ukraine, a license to involve allies of the United States. to attack Europe.

Trump’s comments are a reference to the frustration that he, even as president, has repeatedly expressed about the large number of NATO member states that do not spend enough money on defense. In 2006, NATO defense ministers agreed that member states must spend at least two percent of their Gross Domestic Product on national defense every year. However, a large proportion of them structurally do not reach that percentage. This also applied to the Netherlands, but after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, our country decided to spend significantly more money on defense.

Trump’s comments come at a salient time, just days after American conservative TV journalist Tucker Carlson broadcast a two-hour interview with Russian President Putin on his website. In that interview, Putin claimed that he would have no intention of attacking NATO members such as Poland as long as Russia itself was not attacked first.

Trump is not the first American (former) leader to have spoken out about the defense spending of NATO members. Barack Obama, who succeeded Trump in 2016, also regularly warned European allies that they needed to do more to meet their obligations.

Trump also spoke in South Carolina about the way he wants to tackle migrants. He promised that if he is re-elected president, he will deport migrants en masse.

“From day one, I will put an end to the Biden administration’s open borders policy and launch the largest domestic deportation operation in the history of the United States,” the former president said.

Trump also took credit for the failure of a new migration law in Congress. The current frontrunner in the Republican nomination race threw all his weight into trying to defeat the bill, which was aimed at the migration crisis at the Mexican-American border. In doing so, he did not want to grant the incumbent President Joe Biden any success on the sensitive issue. “Don’t forget that we also had a big win this week. We have destroyed imposter Joe Biden’s disastrous open borders plan,” Trump said.