NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte insists Europe is incapable of defending itself without US military support and would have to more than double current military spending targets to be able to do so.
“If anyone thinks here … that the European Union or Europe as a whole can defend itself without the US, keep on dreaming. You can’t,” Rutte told EU lawmakers in Brussels on Monday.
Europe and the United States “need each other,” he said.
Tensions are festering within NATO over US President Donald Trump’s renewed threats in recent weeks to annex Greenland, which is a semi-autonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark.
Trump also said that he was slapping new tariffs on Greenland’s European backers, but later dropped his threats after a “framework” for a deal over the mineral-rich island was reached, with Rutte’s help. Few details of the agreement have emerged.
The 32-nation military organisation is bound together by a mutual defence clause, Article 5 of NATO’s founding Washington treaty, which commits every country to come to the defence of an ally whose territory is under threat.
At NATO’s summit in The Hague in July, European allies – with the exception of Spain – plus Canada agreed to Trump’s demand that they invest the same percentage of their economic output on defence as the US within a decade.
They pledged to spend 3.5 per cent of gross domestic product on core defence, and a further 1.5 per cent on security-related infrastructure – a total of five per cent of GDP – by 2035.
“If you really want to go it alone,” Rutte said, “forget that you can ever get there with five per cent. It will be 10 per cent. You have to build up your own nuclear capability. That costs billions and billions of euros.”
France has led calls for Europe to build its “strategic autonomy,” and support for its stance has grown since the Trump administration warned last year that its security priorities lie elsewhere and that the Europeans would have to fend for themselves.
Rutte told the lawmakers that without the United States, Europe “would lose the ultimate guarantor of our freedom, which is the US nuclear umbrella. So, hey, good luck!”
Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney says some of US President Donald Trump’s threats should be viewed as prepositioning ahead of negotiations to renew the free trade pact between the two large trading partners.
Carney noted they are entering a review of the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement this year and said he expects a “robust review”.
“The president is a strong negotiator, and some of these comments and positioning should be viewed in the broader context of that,” Carney said on Monday.
Trump threatened on the weekend to impose a 100 per cent tariff on goods imported from Canada if America’s northern neighbour went ahead with a trade deal with Beijing, though Carney has said Canada has no interest in negotiating a comprehensive trade deal with Beijing.
Dominic LeBlanc, Canada’s minister responsible for Canada-US Trade, said he spoke with US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on Sunday and made it clear that the Canadians are negotiating a “narrow trade arrangement” with China that mostly deals with just “a few sectors of our economy”.
He compared that to an agreement Trump made with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea last northern summer in which the US cut some tariffs on China while Beijing moved to allow rare earth exports and lift a pause on purchasing US soy.
LeBlanc also said upcoming talks were a review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement and not a full-scale renegotiation of trade as happened during Trump’s first term.
Breaking with the US this month during a visit to Beijing, Carney cut its 100 per cent tariff on Chinese electric cars in return for lower tariffs on those Canadian products.
Trump’s tariff threat came amid an escalating war of words with Carney as the president’s push to acquire Greenland strained the NATO alliance.
Carney has emerged as a spokesman for a movement for countries to find ways to link up and counter the US under Trump.
“Middle powers must act together because if you are not at the table, you are on the menu,” Carney said in Davos.
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