From PBS NewsHour.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a Senate committee Wednesday that the U.S. benefits from its membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but other members need to boost their defense capabilities and spending.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, referenced a bill that Rubio authored when he was in the Senate to prevent President Donald Trump from leaving the alliance unilaterally. She asked Rubio whether the United States benefits from NATO. Rubio responded, “we do,” but noted later that the alliance needs to be “a rebalancing” so other members can increase their own defenses.
Our allies “have to be willing to step up, but they also have to be capable of stepping up and frankly, many of them have not,” Rubio said.
Shaheen said that, while she agreed with the president’s call for European allies to increase their defense spending, she was concerned with Trump’s rhetoric undermining the alliance. These included his verbal attacks against Canada and his calls for the U.S. to take over Greenland, a territory of NATO ally Denmark. The president suggested last week that the U.S. "never needed" NATO, adding that it stayed “a little back, little off the front lines” in Afghanistan. The comments drew swift backlash from allies across Europe.
Rubio said that European allies understand that without the U.S., there is no NATO.
“We understand that in order for NATO to be stronger, our partners need to be stronger,” he went on. “One of the things we’ve explained to our allies in NATO is [that] the United States is not simply focused on Europe. We also have defense needs in the Western Hemisphere. We have defense needs in the Indo-Pacific. We may be the richest country in the world, but we don’t have unlimited resources.”
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