COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Denmark’s prime minister says a letter from President Donald Trump accusing Danes of not spending enough on NATO has “a unilateral focus on military spending as a percentage of the gross domestic product on defense.”
Ahead of a July 11-12 NATO summit, Trump sent letters to several NATO allies demanding they boost their defense spending.
In an email Wednesday to The Associated Press, Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen said he “was not surprised by the letter” where Trump wrote “the United States is increasingly unwilling to ignore the European failure to meet shared security commitments.”
After Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, NATO allies agreed to stop cutting defense budgets and start moving toward a goal of devoting 2 percent of GDP to defense within a decade.
