It’s a refrain we’ve seen time and time again in the Trump administration: President Donald Trump gets together with world leaders who are supposed to be our allies, and then goes on the attack.
This time, at a NATO Summit in Brussels, Trump claimed that our fellow NATO nations succumbed to his pressure to increase their defense spending. “Everyone's agreed to substantially up their commitment. They're going to up it at levels that they've never thought of before,” he said.
Except they had thought of it before, as Trump’s claims simply mirror a NATO deal made in 2014 — where leaders agreed to spend 2 percent of their Gross Domestic Products on defense by the year 2023.
Even as it seems his claims are untrue, could they be a winning strategy here at home for Trump? And what lies ahead for his London trip and meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin? Jim Braude was joined by Carol Saivetz, senior adviser at MIT's Security Studies Program and Gautam Mukunda, a Harvard Kennedy School fellow, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and author of “Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter.”
