Dr Ian Davis
Former United States President and leading 2024 Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump made headlines earlier this year by claiming to have told the leader of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member state that the USA would not come to its defence against a Russian attack if the state had not met its NATO military spending targets. This was not a complete surprise, however, since Trump had said similar things in 2020, and the complaint that the USA protects its European allies at the US taxpayers’ expense has been a frequent refrain of most recent US presidents.
Yet pressure to boost European military spending has not only come from across the Atlantic. Since the invasion of Ukraine, many European leaders have called for spending increases. In February, for example, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen urged European countries to bolster their arms industries: facing a world ‘that has got rougher’, ‘we have to spend more, we have to spend better, and we have to spend European’.
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