Former US President Donald Trump says he had threatened NATO allies not to help them in case of a conflict with Russia if they remained reluctant to boost military spending.
Trump told his supporters at a Saturday rally in Wyoming that, unlike his predecessors, he was straightforward in admitting that Washington was not going to help NATO.
"You are delinquent, you owe billions and billions of dollars," Trump allegedly told European countries. When asked by one NATO member "Does this mean that if we aren’t paid up in full and if we happen to be attacked by Russia, does this mean that you won’t protect us?" Trump said he answered "Yes, we will not protect you."
The former president claimed that after that, "the money came roaring in" from European members of the military alliance and that he "got them to pay 430 billion dollars into NATO."
Trump claimed that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg was allegedly his "biggest fan."
Earlier this week, Stoltenberg said that the new NATO Strategic Concept, expected to be adopted at the Madrid summit in June, will no longer name Russia as the bloc's strategic partner. China is yet to be included in the document as a threat, Stoltenberg added.
Moscow has repeatedly stated that NATO is an alliance aimed at confrontation. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in early April that further expansion of the alliance eastward is aggressive in nature and will not make Europe more secure. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also said that it has nothing to do with the fulfillment of statutory goals and is geared toward strengthening and perpetuating the unipolar world.