Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance said Donald Trump would keep the US in NATO if reelected, though it’s important that the trans-Atlantic alliance isn’t “just a welfare client.”
“Donald Trump wants NATO to be strong. He wants us to remain in NATO,” the Ohio senator said on NBC’s Meet the Press in an interview broadcast Sunday. “But he also wants NATO countries to actually carry their share of the defense burden.”
Trump regularly boasts that his pressure on European allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization goaded them to step up defense spending during his time in the White House. At a rally in February, he raised jitters by saying he once told a leader at a NATO meeting that he’d tell Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to those who weren’t meeting their obligations.
“We would stay in NATO,” Vance said on NBC, when pressed for a direct answer.
Without setting down explicit conditions for the US to stay in NATO, Vance criticized an imbalance in member countries’ commitments and singled out Germany, Europe’s biggest economy and a frequent target of Trump’s pressure during his presidency.
“It’s effectively the United Kingdom, a couple of other nations and the United States,” he said. “NATO’s problem is particularly Germany has to spend more on security, has to spend more on defense.”
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Vance declined to describe Russian President Vladimir Putin as an enemy, suggesting his cooperation would be needed “if we’re ever going to end the war in Ukraine.” He called China the biggest threat to the US.
“I think that he’s clearly an adversary,” Vance said of Putin. “He is a competitor.”
