Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Friday that he and Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump agree when it comes to the United States’ role in NATO.
“You know, he had spoken earlier that day to the Washington Post editorial board and raised some serious questions about NATO. I share some of those questions,” Cotton said in an interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “We used to split our costs 50/50 between the U.S. and Europe. Today, it’s 70-30 between the U.S. and Europe.”
Cotton, who with other Republicans met with Trump this week, offered that he has different ideas than the billionaire businessman when it comes to a solution.
“Now, I would have a different approach. Rather than reducing our spending on what’s a critical national security alliance, I would urge European leaders, as I have for four years, to increase their spending, specifically, so we can stop the kind of terrorist attacks we’ve seen in Paris and Brussels, so we don’t see in our eastern NATO partners, Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania, the kinds of hybrid warfare that we have seen in Ukraine and Georgia,” he said. “So he identified a serious problem that I’ve tried to address with some of my colleagues. I just had a slightly different solution for that problem.”
In a meeting with the Post’s editorial board, Trump said NATO as a concept was “good” but that the “distribution of costs has to be changed.”
When asked whether he could see Trump as president, Cotton affirmed the idea.
“Well I think he could be the commander in chief,” Cotton said. “He’s one of our leading candidates, and as I said, any of our candidates right now would be a better commander in chief, they’d be a more serious leader for our country than Hillary Clinton is, who has not only been the architect for Barack Obama’s foreign policy, which has left the world aflame but also shown such a casual disregard for the handling of sensitive national security secrets that I believe she’s disqualified for being the commander in chief.”
