GOP front-runner Donald Trump is not backing off his threat to leave the North Atlantic Treaty Organization if other countries don’t pay more.
“We may have to leave for one day,” Trump said Saturday during a rally in Watertown, N.Y., just days before the New York primary on Tuesday.
Trump said that NATO is obsolete and that members of the alliance aren’t carrying their weight.
“With me, they are gonna pay or they are gone,” Trump said.
NATO was formed through a 1949 treaty designed to deter the Soviet Union from invading western European states with the threat that the United States would treat an attack on any member state as an attack on itself. The organization’s guidelines say that each country has to contribute two percent of the gross domestic product to defense. But with the treaty effectively making the U.S. responsible for members’ defense, only five of the 27 countries meet that target, according to a CNN report.
Other presidential candidates such as Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders called for NATO members to pay more for defense during the latest Democratic debate last Thursday.
