The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a longtime favorite punching bag of President Trump’s.
At rallies and in interviews, he has repeatedly chastised members of the Western alliance for not spending enough on military budgets, criticized their armed forces as weak and suggested that the United States might not defend them in an attack.
As NATO leaders arrived in Ankara, Turkey, on Tuesday for their annual summit, Mr. Trump once again berated allies for not assisting the United States in its war against Iran. “Italy turned us down, and Germany turned us down, and France turned us down,” he said. “And in a way, I was testing people.”
Here is a recap of some of Mr. Trump’s broadsides against NATO over the years.
MILITARY spending
‘I’m very unhappy with Spain.’
Mr. Trump has repeatedly insulted members as “delinquent” for not spending enough on their military budgets, portraying them as freeloaders who benefited unfairly from Washington’s “one-way” protection.
In 2018, he called Americans “the schmucks that are paying for the whole thing.” Last year, when Spain became the only NATO member to not commit to a large increase in military spending, Mr. Trump called the country a “laggard” and mused about imposing higher tariffs in retaliation.
“I’m very unhappy with Spain,” Mr. Trump said in October. “I was thinking of giving them trade punishment through tariffs because of what they did.”
In March, when Madrid refused to allow U.S. aircraft access to its military bases for the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, Mr. Trump notched up the rhetoric by threatening to completely end all trade with Spain.
Neither threat has come to pass.
Collective defense
Russia should ‘do whatever the hell they want.’
Mr. Trump has repeatedly questioned one of NATO’s core provisions: the commitment laid out in Article 5 of its founding charter to treat an attack on one member as an attack on all.
“If they don’t pay, I’m not going to defend them,” he told reporters last year.
Speaking at a campaign rally in 2024, Mr. Trump suggested that not only might the United States refuse to defend a NATO ally from Russian attack, but that his administration could applaud it.
In the remarks, Mr. Trump recounted his response to a hypothetical question from the leader of a large NATO country about how the United States would respond if Russia attacked a member that had refused to “pay up” during his first term in office.
“No, I would not protect you,” he recalled himself as saying. “In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You’ve got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”
Defending Montenegro
‘A tiny country with very strong people’
Mr. Trump raised doubt over whether the United States would defend Montenegro, using it as an example to demonstrate his apparent misgivings over the commitment to defending NATO members.
“Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people,” he said in 2018, when asked on Fox News whether U.S. forces should go to war to defend the Balkan country, which was the most recent member of the alliance.
“They may get aggressive, and congratulations, you’re in World War III,” he said.
military contributions
‘We have never really asked anything of them.’
In January as NATO members refused to entertain Mr. Trump’s threats to acquire Greenland, he reached for more insults.
“We have never really asked anything of them,” the president said in an interview with Fox Business. “You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan, or this or that. And they did. They stayed a little back, little off the front lines.”
Mr. Trump’s remarks prompted widespread pushback in Britain, which lost 457 service members during two decades of fighting in the Afghanistan war after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the comments “insulting and frankly appalling.” That was the only time NATO’s collective security agreement was invoked.
