Less than 6 months on from his scandalous performance at Davos (that I reviewed here: https://greenleftie.uk/2026/01/23/trump-has-shafted-the-u-s-a-and-torpedoed-the-special-relationship-hurrah/ ), things have not really changed at all as Trump throws his flabby, fetid weight about at the current NATO Summit in Turkiye.

Here is the Reuters report on today:

That last paragraph dismays me. It is a package that commits 12 European nations, including the UK, France and Germany, will spend more than $50 billion over the next 10 years to develop long-range precision weapons to strengthen NATO’s defense capabilities. It includes European countries buying surveillance drones from US company Northrop Grumman NOC.N, and NATO buying planes from Sweden’s Saab. Guess whose share prices have rocketed.

Let me re-visit an issue i dealt with in January regarding NATO budgets. I need to acknowledge that getting accurate data is nigh on impossible. The last year with anything like credible and complete data is still 2024 and I acknowledge that a lot has happened since then. Nonetheless, it gives the lie to US assertions that they fund NATO almost single-handedly and that Europe doesn’t put in a ‘fair share’, for want of a better term.

Aggregating and averaging sources (The data is a lot more reliable for the top 13 countries than most of the others) yields this table of NATO budget contributions reported:

Note that I have used an exchange rate of £1 = $1.25, giving a total budget of $3.6bn. So that £50bn over 10 years is a huge hike, way more than doubling the budget!

Nonetheless, notice some interesting facts that may surprise you in light of media coverage. Does the USA contribute half of the budget? Nowhere near. Does it contribute a third of the budget, in line with it having one third of the NATO countries combined populations? Nope, nowhere near that either. In fact, it is merely less than 16% and barely the biggest contribution at all (some sources have their contribution much closer to Germany’s).

So, okay, they do contribute the biggest share, just, but per person? That would be a much more meaningful gauge of their overall contribution, surely. So here is that table again, re-ordered on that basis:

Bloody cheap skates!!! They actually contribute less than the average of £2.65 per head per year. And not by just a little bit either! At £1.36 per head, it is barely half of the average contribution, less than half of Spain, less that a third of Canada, and barely 10% of what Norway contributes and just 11% of what Denmark puts in (including on Greenlands behalf).

So, don’t listen to Trump’s bullshit about the USA getting a bad deal. The USA is actually screwing most of us over!

So what if we kicked the USA out? We had better look after our Canadian and Greenlander friends by letting them stay and out of the clutches of Trump’s USA. If we were to remove the U.S. contribution of £455 million and share that out between the remaining population of 756 million people, if works out at £0.60 per person extra, per year. Just over a penny a week each.

And as I said in January, would we need this much of a budget if we weren’t supporting U.S. led conflicts all over the planet, especially if the threat from Russia was removed? I don’t think so. NATO has evolved from a defence pact to an imperialist war machine, as Sweta Choudhury eloquently portrays in her article “We need to talk about Nato: an imperialist war machine” in 2019.

This is a key point: Trump may have brought these issues to a head this week, but they are nothing new. The problem isn’t Trump. The problem is the U.S.A. I came across this from a Danish economist,  Lars Christensen:

“The problem isn’t Trump. The problem is the U.S. When the outside world observes Trump’s insane behavior and his threats against allies, and we at the same time observe that there is no real action from the U.S. public, Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court, or the U.S. media about this insanity, we will all have to conclude that the U.S. accepts this behavior.”

They voted him twice, FFS! They have taken no meaningful steps to remove him. Before re-electing him, he was found guilty/liable in court of (a) 34 counts of first-degree falsification of business accounts to cover-up hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, (b) sexual assault and defamation of his victim, along with various cases of sexual impropriety, defamation, business malpractice and anti-SLAPP lawsuits that have either been settled out of court or are still mired in the system (probably indefinitely). And who knows what is still lurking in those Epstein files. You are or become what you elect and tolerate. How many times have I invoked the quote: “All that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing”?   

So, it is well beyond the time when we should have disbanded NATO and distanced ourselves from the U.S.A. Their influence across Europe (the world even), in the last few decades especially, has been mostly negative. They have led us in the wrong direction not just militarily (Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Ukraine and, of course, Iran) but economically (rampant capitalism allied to protectionism), environmentally (‘drill baby drill’) and socio-politically (fuelling the rise of fascistic right-wing populism around the globe).

Enough is enough.

Data sources:

nato.int/en/what-we-do/introduction-to-nato/funding-nato

gabelli.com/research/nato-spending-overview

taxpayer.net/national-security/how-much-does-nato-cost-the-united-states

bbc.com/news/articles/clyz4nq91wpo

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