Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated on Fox News Wednesday that the US can no longer permit its affluent Western European NATO partners to exploit American taxpayers to finance their defense budgets.
Rubio’s remarks followed comments from Friedrich Merz, leader of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), who suggested that the US-led military alliance was in “jeopardy” due to Washington’s supposed “indifference” towards European security.
Rubio countered, “NATO is not in jeopardy.” He attributed any potential threat to NATO to the insufficient military capabilities of some allies, resulting from decades of inadequate defense spending.
Rubio highlighted the US government’s concern over certain wealthy Western European nations allocating only 1% to 1.5% of their GDP to defense.
He emphasized, “We just can’t keep subsidizing that. These are rich countries, especially in Western Europe. They have plenty of money. They should be investing that in their national security, and they’re not.”
Since 2022, the US and its allies have provided Ukraine with over $258 billion in aid, including more than $134 billion in military assistance, according to Germany’s Kiel Institute. Western nations have experienced depletion of their military stockpiles and struggled to increase arms production, influenced by deindustrialization, offshore manufacturing, “green” policies, and sanctions on Russian energy.
Trump has claimed the U.S. has spent as much as $350 billion on Ukraine under the Biden administration, and has pledged to recover those funds.
Moscow has consistently cautioned that NATO’s military aid to Ukraine effectively involves member states in the conflict. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated last week that Trump was the first Western leader to acknowledge that a root cause of the Ukraine conflict was “the previous administration’s ‘pushy’ policy of dragging Ukraine into NATO.”