March 27, 2017

Wow. There are no words for this level of derpitude and pettiness.

I can't even with this. It's better to just let the Independent UK explain it:

Angela Merkel will reportedly ignore Donald Trump’s attempts to extricate £300bn from Germany for what he deems to be owed contributions to Nato.

The US President is said to have had an “invoice” printed out outlining the sum estimated by his aides as covering Germany’s unpaid contributions for defence.

Said to be presented during private talks in Washington, the move has been met with criticism from German and Nato officials.

$300 billion in UK pounds is roughly $375 billion US dollars. No one is talking who has seen the actual document, but the estimates reportedly come from a directive from Trump to aides to calculate the difference below the two percent of GDP that NATO asks members to contribute...plus interest.

So classy, this guy. He has countless lawsuits against him personally for failure to pay contractors, but he's got nothing better to do than piss off one of our most important allies by playing some internation combination of mobster and collection agent.

And to no one's surprise, he's just pulled this whole idea of Germany not pulling their own weight in NATO from his posterior (or some extremist right wing blog, a distinction without a difference, generally speaking). WaPo:

U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder wrote that increased defense budgets by Germany aren’t transferred to the United States. He also pointed out that NATO decided to make the 2 percent requirement mandatory just a couple of years ago. The alliance gave all member states until 2024 to reach that goal, and Germany is on track.

“Trump’s comments misrepresent the way NATO functions,” Daalder told us. “The President keeps saying that we need to be paid by the Europeans for the fact that we have troops in Europe or provide defense there. But that’s not how it works.”[..]
As Merkel argued in a speech last month, mutual security goes beyond military spending. International development aid on things like hospitals and schools does as much for peace as warheads in Europe. “When we help people in their home countries to live a better life and thereby prevent crises, this is also a contribution to security,” Merkel said in Munich. “So I will not be drawn into a debate about who is more military-minded and who is less.”

She and other German leaders also point out that they’re bearing the brunt of the Syrian refugee crisis, spending 30 to 40 billion euros a year. If that was included in the tally, they say, they’d be putting more than 2 percent of their budget a year toward security. (They’re also quick to note that U.S. military interventions are one reason there are so many displaced people from the Middle East.)

But Trump doesn't want to have anything to do with those refugees either. He's more than happy to have Germany foot that bill.

In the interest of fairness, the White House denies that they sent this "invoice". But given their utter lack of credibility when it comes to being honest, take that denial in the same vein as their denial of connections to Putin.

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