Photo: AFP
President Trump wrapped up a successful NATO summit at The Hague on Wednesday. Though the image some people took away from the meeting was that of NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte calling Trump “Daddy” when making an analogy comparing NATO members to unruly children, Trump came away happy for getting much of NATO to sign on to the idea of paying more of their fair share on their defense. WOR White House correspondent Jon Decker attended the summit; he called in to 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program from London’s Heathrow Airport on his way back to the States and proclaimed the NATO summit as a successful negotiation for “Daddy”.
“I think it was a very successful summit for President Trump,” Decker told host Larry Mendte. “For ten years, he’s been pushing for all of the NATO members to, in his words, ‘pay their fair share’, and that’s exactly what he got in terms of an agreement at the end of this summit, an agreement that each and every one of the 32 members of NATO will increase their defense spending within the next ten years. Spain is the outlier; they’re not going to meet the threshold of spending 5% of their GDP on defense, but the President said he’s going to put pressure on them to increase that defense spending over the course of his second term.”
Decker says the other NATO leaders treated Trump with a different sense of respect than in meetings during his first administration. “This is a President that is very confident in his skills and what he can bring forward in terms of the leader of NATO. I think that has a lot to do with it, and it didn’t hurt in terms of what happened over the weekend with the strike on those three nuclear sites in Iran.”
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