President Donald Trump’s Wednesday speech on the World Economic Forum in Switzerland was stuffed with inaccurate claims – notably together with false and deceptive statements about NATO and Greenland, the self-governing Danish territory he’s pushing for the US to amass.
Trump additionally repeated quite a few long-debunked false claims about international affairs, the financial system and different points. Here is a truth verify of some of his remarks.
US advantages from NATO: Trump claimed: “So what we have gotten out of NATO is nothing, except to protect Europe from the Soviet Union and now Russia. I mean, we’ve helped them for so many years. We’ve never gotten anything.”
This is just not true – even leaving apart arguments that the US has reaped essential army, financial and political advantages from the existence of the alliance. NATO got here to the protection of the US after the al Qaeda terrorist assaults of September 11, 2001.
The alliance invoked Article 5, its collective protection provision, for the only time in its history, and member international locations shaped a coalition to combat a struggle in Afghanistan alongside US forces. Member international locations fought there for years, and many of them suffered casualties. Denmark, for instance, lost more than 40 soldiers, one of the alliance’s highest per-capita dying charges.
NATO members’ protection spending: Trump additionally claimed that, “until I came along,” the US “was paying for virtually 100% of NATO,” including, “We paid for, in my opinion, 100% of NATO.” Trump’s “opinion” is factually inaccurate. NATO figures present that, in 2024, US protection spending made up about 63% of complete NATO protection spending; in 2016, the yr earlier than Trump took workplace the primary time, it was about 72%. Both figures are huge, of course, however nowhere close to the 100% determine he has used for years.
And the US contributes a smaller share to NATO’s personal organizational finances. Under an agreed method, the US supplied about 16% of that finances on the time Trump returned to workplace in 2025. When he took workplace in 2017, the US was contributing about 22% of the finances.
Trump additionally mentioned that, regardless of a NATO goal of every member spending 2% of gross home product on protection, “most of the countries weren’t paying anything” till he got here alongside. In truth, each NATO member was spending one thing by itself protection when Trump wasn’t president; complete protection spending by non-US members was $292 billion in 2016 and an estimated $482 billion in 2024, NATO figures show. While it’s true that many members have been sluggish to hit the two% goal, a majority of them have been assembly it in 2024, NATO figures present, with 18 of the 31 members topic to the goal at or above 2%.
In 2016, 4 NATO members have been hitting the goal; in 2020, the final yr of Trump’s first time period, it was eight members.
How NATO spending works: Trump repeated a declare he made on numerous occasions throughout his first presidency – that, earlier than he grew to become president, NATO international locations “weren’t paying their bills.” While it’s attainable to make use of the phrase “paying their bills” figuratively, it’s value noting that NATO’s 2% goal utilized to international locations’ personal home spending; it didn’t create “bills” or imply international locations owed cash to the US, as Trump additionally claimed throughout his first time period.
The NATO goal was raised in 2025 to three.5% of GDP on the “core” protection spending that was coated by the earlier 2% goal and a further 1.5% on a broader vary of security-related spending.
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