President Donald Trump's pressure campaign on North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies to boost spending for their own defense is paying off, U.S. NATO Ambassador Kay Bailey Hutchison said.
Separately, the U.S. envoy said she's concerned that Russia is trying to "flip" Turkey and other American allies to its column.
"NATO really is making progress, and they are doing it really at President Trump's insistence," Hutchinson said on Fox News Sunday. "It's very clear, and he's been very direct about the Europeans needing to do more for their own security."
Hutchison, a former Republican senator from Texas, took up her NATO role in August. She spoke ahead of a potentially testy two-day summit of NATO nations to be held in Brussels starting Wednesday.
The U.S. has been seeking an increased commitment by alliance members to increase defense spending. In the past few weeks, Trump has sent sharply worded letters to the leaders of several European countries, including Germany, Italy and Norway, as well as to Canada, warning that the U.S. was losing patience.
"It will become increasingly difficult to justify to American citizens why some countries continue to fail to meet our shared collective security commitments," Trump said in a letter addressed to Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg seen by Bloomberg News.
In 2014, NATO members pledged to spend at least 2 percent of economic output on defense by 2024. Estimated 2017 defense spending as a percentage of gross domestic product was 1.2 percent in Germany, Europe's biggest economy. Only five NATO members -- the U.K., Estonia, Poland and Greece, as well as the U.S. -- were forecast to have met the 2 percent target in 2017.
Some diplomats fear the president will threaten to pull troops out of Europe without more spending on defense, despite U.S. denials. Separately, doubts about Trump's commitment to European security have pushed EU leaders to boost defense cooperation.
Although Hutchison said threats by Trump to impose tariffs on European cars haven't come up in the context of NATO, the president has accused European members of the military alliance of denying U.S. companies fair trade access.
Germany's defense minister last week said it was "immature" for the Trump administration to link trade deficits and defense spending.
A country's defense contribution shouldn't be measured only as a percentage of GDP, but also in terms of troops and hardware, Ursula von der Leyen said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Berlin. Still, Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a weekly podcast on Saturday, said Germany would increase defense spending in its 2019 budget.
From the two-day NATO meeting in Brussels, Trump heads to the U.K. and then to a one-on-one meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on July 16.
On Russia, Hutchison said there are signs Moscow is trying to court NATO member Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was re-elected in June and is moving to further consolidate power.
"I do think Russia is trying to flip Turkey; they're trying to flip many of our allies," Hutchison said. "They want to destabilize the strongest defense alliance in the history of the world, and that's NATO."
A Section on 07/09/2018