Why Donald Trump’s boast that he got ‘delinquent’ NATO allies to ‘pay up’ is misleading

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump spurred international alarm when he said he would "encourage" Russia to "do whatever the hell they want" to a NATO member country that didn’t "pay" for collective defense.

Trump made the comment Feb. 10 at a Conway, South Carolina, rally as he described a conversation with an unnamed NATO country leader during his presidency. Trump used the story to claim that he was tough on NATO and got results, misrepresenting several facts about the alliance and his record in the process.

"I got them to pay up," Trump said. "NATO was busted until I came along. I said, ’Everybody’s gonna pay.’ They said, ‘Well, if we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They couldn't believe the answer, and you never saw more money pour in."

NATO’s chief, European leaders and President Joe Biden criticized Trump’s remarks, with Biden saying Trump was too friendly to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some Republicans downplayed what Trump said; others criticized him. 

We can’t fact-check whether that conversation happened, but we can examine how and why European defense spending changed under Trump (and other leaders). 

First, an important clarification: No countries are "delinquent" on NATO payments. For years, Trump has misrepresented a spending target for each country’s defense as payments owed to the alliance. 

"Countries falling short will have weaker defenses than we would like, but they are not delinquent," said Stephen Saideman, a professor at Carleton University's Norman Paterson School of International Affairs.

Many member countries have increased national defense spending since 2014.

But European leaders were probably thinking of a leader other than Trump.

"If any one person is responsible for getting Europeans to spend more on defense, it’s Vladimir Putin," wrote Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs, and a U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO during part of the Obama administration. "Not Donald Trump." 

We contacted Trump spokespeople and got no response.

John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser in 2018 and is now a Trump critic, told The Washington Post that Trump pressed NATO partners aggressively to increase military spending, "but he didn’t say anything about not defending anybody against Russia."

NATO, formally the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was created in 1949 to provide collective security against the Soviet Union. The alliance has 31 members, including the United States.

The alliance agreed that an armed attack against one or more of them would constitute an attack against them all, and each member would take action, including armed force.

NATO countries do not pay money into a broad NATO defense budget; each country determines its own level of military spending. 

In 2014, after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, NATO’s heads of state and government agreed to spend 2% of their GDP on defense by 2024, a target that had been discussed for many years.

The agreement was aspirational, not binding. Countries are not "delinquent" if they’ve missed that target.

"They're welching on a commitment, but there is no enforcement mechanism," said Justin Logan, Cato Institute director of defense and foreign policy studies. 

The 2% target is "about each country investing in their own defense so that the alliance as a whole could be stronger, better able to deter or defeat various threats (mostly Russia)," Saideman said.

NATO wasn’t "busted" when Trump became president in 2017.

NATO defense spending has been increasing since the 2014 Crimea annexation, and spending accelerated after Russia further invaded Ukraine in 2022, Jeremy Shapiro, the European Council on Foreign Relations’ research director, told PolitiFact. 

Justin Logan, the Cato Institute’s defense and foreign policy studies director, said Russia’s attacks and Trump’s statements affected the allies’ spending decisions.

"Poland’s skyrocketing spending, for instance, has everything to do with fear of Russia," Logan said. Poland increased its defense spending as a share of GDP from about 2.4% in 2022 to 3.9% in 2023. 

As of July 2023, NATO reported that 11 countries met the 2% GDP goal: Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, the Slovak Republic, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Feb. 14 that he expects 18 allies to spend 2% of GDP on defense in 2024 — a sixfold increase since 2014, when only three allies met the target.

"Politically, meeting the 2% level keeps your country out of the spotlight and in a general state of political grace," Logan said, "which is why so many tiny and vulnerable East European countries do so." 

Logan offered caveats about focusing on the 2%-of-GDP target. 

Two percent "of the German economy is more than double the entire Estonian economy," pointing to GDP.

Many of the members meeting the target — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia — offer almost no usable military power. 

"France and Turkey, which don’t meet the 2% standard, have far more firepower than most of those who meet the standard," Logan said.

Trump is wrong to say that his threats alone prompted NATO allies to increase defense funding. The Barack Obama and Biden administrations also called for increased European defense spending.

"It is impossible to say whether Trump’s threats had more of an impact than Obama and Biden’s appeals to solidarity," Shapiro said. 

Biden and top officials have supported the 2% target. When Biden met with Stoltenberg in June 2023, Biden said, "We’re going to be building on that momentum, from working to ensure that Allies spend enough on the defense, the 2 percent — not just as a hike, but that’s the bottom line."

Every American president since Harry S. Truman urged European allies to do more, Daalder wrote. "Trump was hardly the first. Nor the last."

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PolitiFact Senior Correspondent Louis Jacobson contributed to this article.