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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday ripped into North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies while announcing a new six-month review of U.S. troop deployments in Europe, accusing the alliance of being a “paper tiger.”
Hegseth told defense ministers at the NATO headquarters in Brussels that the review will ensure the alliance moves “fast and irreversibly toward Europe leading,” though he did not say if it will result in a drawdown of U.S. deployments to the continent. He said NATO allies “must step up.”
“President Trump has been very clear on this point for many years and over two administrations,” Hegseth said. “And for too long, NATO has been a paper tiger and a one-way street. No more.”
He urged the alliance to become a “NATO 3.0 modeled on the NATO 1.0 that won the Cold War,” adding that NATO’s framers, like former President Eisenhower, “always expected” Europe to take the lead. Hegseth claimed that under NATO 2.0, it drifted to focusing on “gender equity and climate change and defense austerity.”
“NATO lost its way,” he continued. “NATO 2.0 was an era of distraction, deindustrialization and demilitarization. It was an era of free riding and those were lost years that we’re not going back to. And that’s why, at the Department of War, we’ve been so clear and so candid to restore NATO’s core military role and character.”
Hegseth said that the U.S.’s dues to NATO will be contingent on other member nations meeting their own respective defense spending targets. The U.S. will lower its dues if other allies “do not spend with urgency.”
Hegseth also blasted NATO allies for not supporting the U.S. in the Iran war, accusing them of trying “to drown us in arcane legal debates, or criticized us publicly for doing what they aren’t prepared or able to do themselves.”
Some European allies declined to offer their bases for U.S. aircraft set to be deployed to the Middle East.
President Trump in March referred to NATO as a “paper tiger” over Europe’s collective stance on the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran had shut down during its conflict with the U.S., Israel and other Gulf states.
The Trump administration announced it was scaling back U.S. troop presence by about 5,000 in both Poland and Germany in recent weeks, though it later announced an additional 5,000 troops would be sent to Poland, facing bipartisan blowback.
Earlier this month, the U.S. told European allies that it would reduce the number of fighter jets and warships, The New York Times reported last week.
These proposed drawdowns included a reduction of F-16 and F-15E fighter jets from roughly 150 to 100, reducing P-8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft from 26 to 15, and cutting all eight aerial refueling tanker jets previously available to Europe.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said Wednesday that there will be no immediate impact as the U.S. cuts the number of troops and equipment to traditional allies in the event of an attack.
“This is not about where forces and assets are currently located,” Rutte told reporters in Brussels, according to The Associated Press. “It’s about who would do what if our defense plans were activated.”
Rutte also said that U.S. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s top commander, believes allies either have “or will have in the near future” enough in their arsenals to compensate for the gaps left by a U.S. drawdown, adding that the “overall picture is looking good.”
NATO countries last year committed to invest 5 percent of gross domestic product annually in defense spending, though most members have yet to hit the previous 3.5 percent target.
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