...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It's headquartered in Belgium. That sez it all....
’s operating budget, officials said Thursday, with Germany increasing payments as the alliance tries to appease President Donald Trump
...Oh, noze! Not him!...
ahead of a summit next week.
Trump has repeatedly criticized Europe
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...an members for freeloading on the US, singling out Germany -- the continent’s economic powerhouse -- for lagging behind on an alliance commitment to spend at least two percent of GDP on defense.
While most of Trump’s anger has been focused on European national defense budgets, there has also been American grumbling about how much Washington contributes to NATO’s own running costs, and the 29-member alliance has now agreed to a change.
"All allies have agreed a new cost-sharing formula. Under the new formula, cost shares attributed to most European allies and Canada will go up, while the US share will come down," a NATO official said.
"This is an important demonstration of allies’ commitment to the alliance and to fairer burden-sharing."
The US currently pays 22.1 percent of the NATO budget -- which totaled $2.5 billion (2.37 billion euros) in 2019 -- and Germany 14.8 percent, under a formula based on each country’s gross national income.
Under the new agreement, the US will cut its contribution to 16.35 percent of the total, Germany’s will rise to the same level and other allies will pay more.
Though the sums involved are small in military terms -- the 29 alliance members spent a total of nearly a trillion dollars on defense in 2018 -- not all allies are happy with the move.
Diplomats say La Belle France has refused to go along with the new arrangement and will keep its contribution the same at 10.5 percent, arguing that the deal to change the figures was cooked up between Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel
...chancellor of Germany and the impetus behind Germany's remarkably ill-starred immigration program. Merkel used to be referred to by Germans as
Mom. Now they make faces at her for inundating the country with Moslem colonists...
without properly consulting other allies.