The Biden administration immediately blasted the remarks as “appalling and unhinged.”
Trump has long railed against what he sees as European countries freeloading on U.S. military largesse, but his claim over the weekend was provocative even by Trump’s standards.
It also evoked puzzlement in some quarters: No one, including former senior presidential advisers, could recall him ever saying such a thing to a fellow head of state, as he claimed.
The 25-second snippet from Trump’s Saturday night speech reverberated around the planet on Sunday as diplomats parsed the meaning of what many regarded as the most incendiary statement about NATO to date by a former president who repeatedly bashed the alliance during his tenure, while often speaking with admiration about Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Hours earlier, in a separate salvo aimed at another pillar of U.S. foreign policy, Trump vowed to effectively end U.S. aid to countries abroad. Economic development assistance and military aid to foreign countries — a mainstay for Democratic and Republican administrations for decades, partly intended to alleviate suffering and shore up U.S. national security abroad — would be replaced with a program of loans that would have to be repaid, Trump wrote in a posting on his social media platform, Truth Social.
“We should never give money anymore without the hope of a payback, or without ‘strings’ attached,” Trump said in a posting written in capital letters. Any loans would have to be immediately repaid if the recipient “ever turns against us, or strikes it rich sometime in the future,” he wrote.
The immediate reaction from European leaders and diplomats ranged from anger to weary resignation.
“Unfortunately, Trump does not surprise,” Marko Mihkelson, the chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Estonian parliament, said in a text message. “The current presidential campaign only confirms that he has not changed his reckless attitude towards allies. Unfortunately, he is therefore a very convenient tool for Putin’s Russia, which is waging war against the West.”
Some European policymakers said that Trump’s rhetoric was a security threat to the continent. A senior German lawmaker who was a top foreign policy lieutenant of Chancellor Angela Merkel wrote that Europe needed to get ready to stand on its own.
“Everyone should watch this video from Trump and then understand that Europe may soon have no choice but to defend itself,” Norbert Röttgen wrote on his Facebook page. “We have to manage this because anything else would be surrender and self-abandonment!”
A Trump campaign official dismissed the backlash over the remarks from critics he termed “Democrat and media pearl-clutchers.”
“President Trump got our allies to increase their NATO spending by demanding they pay up, but Joe Biden went back to letting them take advantage of the American taxpayer,” Trump senior adviser Jason Miller said. “When you don’t pay your defense spending you can’t be surprised that you get more war.”
Trump’s remarks were part of a standard campaign-trail harangue against NATO allies who have failed to comply with a 2006…
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