On Thursday, President Donald Trump went to NATO headquarters in Brussels, where he had a series of awkward encounters and gave a speech that seemed to have the United States’ NATO allies either snickering or worrying.
During a speech at NATO’s new headquarters, Trump went on an off-script tangent in which he criticized NATO allies who he felt were not paying enough into the organization, despite the payments being set based on the individual country’s domestic spending.
“23 of the 28 member nations are still not paying what they should be paying and what they are supposed to be paying,” Trump claimed.
During the speech, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg Xavier Bettel and recently-elected French President Emmanuel Macron seemed to be snickering to each other. But other NATO allies were nervous, especially Eastern European allies, who would have liked to hear from Trump that he would be honoring NATO’s Article 5, a mutual defense guarantee. Allies nervous about Russian encouragement were hoping to hear a strong commitment to the military alliance, but Trump’s only mention of Article 5 was in talking about NATO invoking it in response to 9/11.
The speech was also surrounded by a series of bizarre actions from the president. At one point, Trump was standing alone on a stage while other world leaders were conversing with each other. At another, Trump seemed to forcibly grab Macron, who had been avoiding him, for a handshake. Macron, in turn, later shook Trump’s hand for a long seven seconds in which Trump tried twice to get out of it.
But perhaps the strangest of all was a clip that very quickly went viral of Trump shoving the prime minister of Montenegro so that he could be at the front of a group of leaders.
Additionally, while Trump was in Brussels, he reportedly called Germany “bad, very bad” because of their trade surplus. And relations between the United States and the United Kingdom are tense as well, with the UK opting not to share any more intelligence with the U.S. concerning the Manchester bombing because of leaks including the name of the bomber and images of the evidence from the scene itself.
