Trump says he threatened not to defend NATO allies from Russia

Donald Trump says that as US president he threatened not to come back to the protection of NATO allies if they had been attacked by Russia except they helped fund the alliance extra.

Both while campaigning and once within the White House, Trump regularly sought to publicly undermine NATO, the USA-led navy alliance at the heart of Western geopolitical electricity in view that World War II, but which he defined as a collection of nations dwelling off US largesse.

However, his remarks late Thursday to an occasion hosted through the right-wing Heritage Foundation had been strangely stark, boasting that the media had failed to be aware his chance.

Although NATO’s Article 5 clause requires members come to the defense of any part of the alliance under attack, Trump said he suggested at a summit that the treaty wouldn’t be honored, because “everybody was delinquent. They didn’t pay.”

“They asked me, one of the presidents…, ‘does that mean you won’t protect us in case of we don’t pay, you won’t protect us from Russia?’… I said, ‘that’s exactly what that means.'”

Trump, who has frequently described himself as a master negotiator, indicated to laughter at the event that he was bluffing in order to extract concessions.

“Now if I said, ‘No, I don’t mean that,’ then why would they pay? So somebody had to say it,” he said in the comments broadcast by the conservative media outlet RSBN.

Trump went on to say he was “amazed it didn’t get out. The fake news didn’t pull it out.”

And according to the Republican, his threats worked because “the money started to flow in.”

Trump regularly tore into NATO and other long-established US alliances, arguing that the United States spent too much money defending countries that he said were more like fierce rivals than partners.

“We’re defending Europe. At the same time they rip us off on trade, very, very seriously rip us off,” he said in Thursday’s comments, reprising one of his favorite lines of attack on the transatlantic allies.

Trump become additionally often accused of getting a respectful mindset to Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin, whose invasion of non-NATO member Ukraine in February has caused a massive reaction from Washington and its European allies.

In 2020, Trump become additionally impeached for linking the delivery of US army aid to Ukraine to a call for that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky try and dig up on political dirt on then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.