“We have the NATO secretary-general talking about adding Ukraine to NATO,” Grenell told the Davos panel, tuning in on video from Los Angeles. “The American people are the ones that are paying for the defense. You cannot ask the American people to expand the umbrella of NATO when the current members aren’t paying their fair share, and that includes the Dutch who need to step up.
“And so when […] we have leaders who are going to talk about more and more, we need to make sure that those leaders are spending the right amount of money,” he added.
Ukraine, which has been under attack by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces for years now, has unsuccessfully pushed NATO to be admitted to the group.
When Rutte was Dutch prime minister, the Netherlands regularly failed to meet NATO’s 2 percent of GDP defense spending target. But he’s a convert now that he runs the world’s most powerful military alliance.
“Thanks partly also to [Trump] and maybe to a large extent, we have seen this upturn in spending in NATO on the European side,” the NATO chief said.
“He felt that basically the U.S was getting a bad deal and that Europe basically was funding its social model, its health care system, its pension system [while] we’re underfunding in defense. The problem, of course, is that we are not yet all at that 2 percent. That’s problem No. 1. Problem No. 2 is that 2 percent is not nearly enough. To your point, it is not nearly enough,” Rutte said.
