NATO Summit Begins With New Defense Spending, and Trump Complaints

President Trump is complaining about a lack of support from NATO allies as an annual meeting of the alliance gets underway at Ankara, Turkey.NATO leaders met for dinner Tuesday evening at the Turkish presidential compound as part of the two day summit.Mr. Trump spoke with reporters hours earlier during a meeting with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Mr. Trump said he asked European allies for help with the Iran war. “Italy turned us down and Germany turned us down and France turned us down,” Mr. Trump said. “And that’s OK. But, you know, why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars and they’re not there for us?”The complaint came after three more ships were attacked in the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran has threatened to attack any ship that tries to use the waterway without its permission. Continued attacks would threaten a fragile peace deal between America and Iran as negotiations continue on a long-term deal.Mr. Trump has insisted that the other members of the alliance have not paid their fair share and are unfairly relying on American taxpayers to pay for their defense. European members are trying to highlight $50 billion in new defense spending during the summit.NATO members agreed last year to boost defense spending to 5 percent of their gross domestic product by 2035 but some members are struggling to reach the old target of 2 percent. Among them are Belgium, the Czech Republic, Spain, and Slovenia.Mr. Trump is also rubbing old wounds by repeating his desire for America to control Greenland, the semiautonomous island that is part of Denmark. He told reporters Tuesday that Greenland is “an important part for the United States.”“That should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark,” Mr. Trump added.Mr. Trump also said he would remove sanctions on Turkey that are keeping it from buying American F-35 fighters. Mr. Erdoğan’s government was sanctioned and kicked out of America’s F-35 program in 2019 after Turkey purchased Russian-made missile defense systems.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he has asked Mr. Trump several times not to sell the planes to Turkey. Mr. Netanyahu has argued that it would be a threat to Israel for Turkey to have the fighters. “When you give them that power, you’re going to see aggression in its wake. I wouldn’t do that,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a CNN interview.Mr. Trump is set on Wednesday to meet with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Mr. Zelensky met with NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, on Tuesday and reiterated a need for more Patriot missiles to ward off Russian attacks. Moscow has targeted Kyiv twice in the past week with large scale attacks that have left dozens of citizens dead.Mr. Zelensky says the attacks show the dire need for Western countries to provide more air defense systems to Ukraine. “This is the most important thing we will discuss, this topic,” Mr. Zelensky said. “We need it very much and this is an urgent topic for us.”

NATO Summit Begins With New Defense Spending, and Trump Complaints

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