Marco Rubio: Trump defense deal with NATO is a big, beautiful win for America | Exclusive
NATO is now much better poised to project military, diplomatic and economic power to a degree our adversaries cannot dream of equaling, thus deterring future wars.
Winston Churchill once stated, “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.”
Although the United States has been united by treaty with its NATO allies for nearly 80 years, in the years before Donald Trump becoming president, the United States would have had to fight any major war in Europe effectively alone.
Since the end of the Cold War, Europe’s combined military capabilities had steadily degraded to the point of almost total impotence. Fortunately, President Trump’s decade-long calls for NATO allies to contribute more to shared security have recently been answered with a historic commitment among allies to spend a once-unthinkable 5% of gross domestic product on defense − a number that reflects both fairness and strategic wisdom.
Even before he was first elected in 2016, President Trump rightly lamented how the United States bore a disproportionate amount of responsibility for security in Europe.
More seriously for American taxpayers, President Trump questioned why NATO allies had for years shirked fulfilling their funding obligations: “We are getting ripped off by every country in NATO, where they pay virtually nothing, most of them. And we’re paying the majority of the costs.”
President Trump’s righteous indignation predictably triggered outrage in places like Paris, Brussels and Berlin. But the commonsense ethic behind it was irrefutable: Every member of an alliance must properly pull its weight.
Trump demanded NATO allies contribute more to defense
Restoring fairness immediately became a centerpiece of President Trump’s first-term foreign policy agenda, and he delivered spectacularly. When he entered office in 2017, only three NATO allies were paying 2% of their GDP on defense. President Trump insisted that they do better, and now they are.
Today, 29 of 31 allies are reporting plans to spend more than 2%, and all allies except one (Canada) have accelerated plans to hit that goal by the end of 2025. Those increased spending levels have already translated to $700 billion worth of new capabilities.
In the years between the president’s two terms, the Russian invasion of Ukraine exposed why more defense spending was necessary as a matter of national interest. Europe’s exhaustion of its meager weapons stocks to help Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression spelled the end of decades of allied parsimony.
Now, President Trump has been vindicated as Europeans awaken to what must be done.
In January, my counterpart David Lammy, the foreign minister of the United Kingdom, stated, “Donald Trump and JD Vance are simply right when they say that Europe needs to do more to defend its own continent. It’s myopia to pretend otherwise.”
Similar quotes can be found from other NATO leaders.
But President Trump has long recognized that 2% was the floor −not the ceiling − for appropriate allied defense spending. Before returning to office, he urged NATO members to spend 5% of GDP on defense. That number was once laughable for European nations accustomed to splurging more for welfare than weapons.
NATO agreement is a win for American taxpayers
But with the achievement of the Hague defense agreement at the NATO Summit in June, a figure once dismissed as fantasy became reality.
Once allies reach 5%, it will add more than $1 trillion per year in defense spending to the alliance’s annual total, making NATO substantially stronger and more capable of defending against threats. This commitment would not have been possible if not for President Trump’s efforts, something NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte expressed personally.
In business terms, NATO was, until recently, an “underperforming asset.” Now it is becoming one of the United States’ greatest competitive advantages. But there is still more work to be done to reach full strength.
For one thing, the United States is the only country in the world with the companies fully capable of adequately supplying Europe’s defense needs.
Accordingly, NATO allies must allow American firms to compete for defense contracts. Additionally, our allies must rebuild long-ignored capabilities, including airlift assets, air defenses, artillery and command and control capabilities.
Today, NATO is much better poised to project military, diplomatic and economic power to a degree our adversaries cannot dream of equaling, thus deterring future wars.
If he were alive today, Churchill would rest easier knowing that no NATO ally will defend Western civilization alone, because Donald Trump has made the alliance the strongest it has been in decades.
Marco Rubio is U.S. secretary of State and U.S. National Security Adviser.