It’s being reported that when popular vote loser and aging schoolyard bully Donald Trump met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel a couple weekends ago, he handed her an actual printed invoice for over $300 billion – his administration’s assessment of what Germany “owes” the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in unpaid contributions since 2002, plus interest. Merkel was reportedly unrattled by the crassness of this stunt:
The gesture was “outrageous,” the [Sunday Times] quoted an unnamed German minister as saying. “The concept behind putting out such demands is to intimidate the other side, but the chancellor took it calmly and will not respond to such provocations,” the minister is further cited as saying.
The White House has of course denied the story, undermined somewhat by Trump’s subsequent tweets that:
Germany owes vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!
However, the world is getting used to the Donald preferring his own narratives to reality, and if this story is true, it’s an additional recent example of the Trump Administration attempting to shoehorn common business principles into public policy – in this case, foreign policy – where they simply don’t apply.
The root of Trump’s supposed “bill” is the component of the NATO treaty which encourages all member countries to commit 2-percent of their GDP to defense funding by the year 2024. While the U.S., at about 3.6-percent of its GDP, regularly exceeds this number, only four other member countries have been contributing at the suggested level: the U.K., Greece, Poland and Estonia. Germany currently averages 1.2-percent of its GDP in defense spending, although it is gradually raising spending levels to eventually reach the 2024 target.
What the treaty does not do is act as a business contract in which the rest of NATO pays the United States to act as a mercenary military force for Europe. America is not in a position to demand payment, and the treaty has no mechanism for expulsion of members that do not commit the 2-percent spending target each year. No wonder the Chancellor would have simply set Trump’s invoice aside.
As a corollary, however, does Trump intend on handing invoices to all 22 other NATO nations that haven’t been spending at the suggested levels? Was Germany a special exception, or should France, Spain, Turkey, Canada and the others all expect to be billed by the U.S. in the near future? And what on earth does Trump intend to do when none of these countries respond to his bluster?
If the invoice stunt, assuming it actually happened, is aimed squarely at long-time political veteran Merkel, Trump may seriously want to think twice:
Merkel has a plan, one that builds on her considerable experience taking on aggressive “alpha male” bullies, evident in the dozen or so scalps she already has on her belt.