Trump Wants US to Stay in NATO, but Others Need to Do More: Vance

A NATO flag at its headquarters ahead of a NATO Defense Ministers meeting in Brussels on Oct. 21, 2021. Pascal Rossignol/Reuters

The United States would stay in NATO if former President Donald Trump is reelected, according to his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), but he added that other members of the military alliance need to pay their fair share.

“Donald Trump wants NATO to be strong. He wants us to remain in NATO,” Vance said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in an interview that aired on Oct. 27. “But he also wants NATO countries to actually carry their share of the defense burden.”

In 2014, in the wake of Russia’s invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, NATO members all agreed to allocate at least 2 percent of their GDPs to defense within a decade.

In July 2022, as the Russia–Ukraine conflict escalated into a full-scale war, then-NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg stated that the 2 percent threshold was “increasingly considered a floor, not a ceiling.”

By the end of 2023, however, only 10 of NATO’s 31 members had met the target. Although that number is projected to rise to 23 out of 32 members in 2024 after Sweden joined the fold, nearly one-third of alliance members are still falling short of their commitments.

Trump has long criticized European allies whose stated support for the alliance is not matched by sufficient spending. Along the campaign trail, he also highlighted his success in pressuring NATO members to increase their defense expenditure—only five countries were meeting the 2 percent minimum when he assumed office in 2016; that figure had grown to nine by the time he left the White House.

In February, at a rally in South Carolina, Trump recalled that he once told the president of a “big” NATO country that he would not protect that country from a Russian invasion if it didn’t pay its “bills.”

The comments drew both applause and criticism from European officials, with Stoltenberg saying that he was “confident” that the United States will “remain a staunch member of the alliance” regardless of who wins the presidential election this fall because it is in Washington’s interests to “have a strong NATO.”

Democrats have accused Trump of seeking to “abandon” the United States’ NATO allies, although a law passed as part of last year’s national defense budget prevents any U.S. president from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO or using appropriated funds for that purpose without congressional approval.

When pressed by NBC’s Kristen Welker for a direct answer, Vance assured her that under Trump, the United States will remain a member of NATO.

“We would stay in NATO,” Vance said, before moving on to emphasize that wealthier countries such as Germany should spend in accordance with their economic size.

“It’s effectively the United Kingdom, a couple of other nations, and the United States,” he told Welker. “NATO’s problem is particularly Germany has to spend more on security, has to spend more on defense.”

German officials have acknowledged Trump’s and Vance’s concerns and pledged to improve. At the security conference in Munich shortly after Trump’s South Carolina rally, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said that 2 percent will “only be the start of it” and that Germany “might even hit 3.5 percent” depending on “what is happening in the world.”

He also called on all of Europe to step up.

“I am proud to say that this year we will spend over two percent of our GDP on defense,” Pistorius declared at the conference. “I am also realistic enough to see that this might not be enough in the years to come.”