British Royals, PM Host Receptions For NATO Leaders
NOBILO: NATO's Seventieth anniversary meeting is shaping up to be quite a gathering, and front and center of it all is the U.S. President Donald Trump. Mr. Trump called the President of France insulting for saying that NATO is experiencing a brain death. He then offered to send ISIS fighters over to France. Macron said, "Be serious." Mr. Trump then praised Turkey's President, who's recently bought a missile defense system from Russia, bearing in mind that NATO was established to defend against - to be a bulwark against the Soviet Union. He denied knowing that the embattled Prince Andrew, despite the photos evidence, otherwise had been involved with Epstein and Trump had met him in a similar situation. And he has promise not to weigh in on the British election, which is playing out currently in the United Kingdom and is only nine days away from taking place. President Trump, himself, hasn't been the biggest NATO fan. Here's what he said on the campaign trail.</s>WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST: Do you think the United States needs to rethink U.S. involvement in</s>NATO. TRUMP: Yes, because it's costing us too much money. Number one, NATO is obsolete. Number two, the countries in NATO are not paying their fair share. It's obsolete and we pay too much money. NATO is obsolete. In my opinion NATO's obsolete. So here's the problem with NATO, it's obsolete. It was 67 years or it's over 60 years old. When I said that NATO to Wolf Blitzer it's obsolete, I got attacked. Three days later people that study NATO say, you know, Trump is right.</s>NOBILO: Well, speaking of people who might study NATO, let's break all this down with CNN Political and National Security Analyst, David Sanger. David, good to have you on the program.</s>DAVID SANGER, CNN POLITICAL & NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Thank you, Bianca.</s>NOBILO: We were just listening to several snippets from a few years back when President Trump was talking about NATO being obsolete. Now he seems to be trying to rally the NATO members around, and get them to increase their defense spending and to revitalize the organization. Do you think that he has had some success in that, in having an impact on getting the countries to pay their fair share?</s>SANGER: Certainly, Bianca, I think his jawboning has resulted in their willingness to step up with a bit more money. The administration maintains that they are now paying $130 billion more. That's true. If you add it up back to 2016 when Barack Obama was still President, there was more - probably upwards of $400 billion more on tab if they deliver it. But what was striking in that rather tense exchange that you heard with President Macron was that the two leaders are talking past each other about what central to this. To President Trump it's all about who pays for NATO, and that's an important topic. You may remember President Obama beat up on the NATO countries as well for not contributing enough. But the second issue is what is NATO's mission supposed to be? And here you saw President Trump talking about everything except containment of Russian aggression, including in Ukraine. And you heard President Macron doubled down on that and some other areas, including cyber and other new technologies where NATO got a long way to go.</s>NOBILO: Yes, that was really striking when you saw the two of them together. That the President Trump's focus, as often is, was on the financial aspects of this and then it seemed Emmanuel Macron was focusing on the strategic aspects of this and the evolving nature of the threats and subsequently the objectives that NATO should be pursuing. When it comes to that, when it comes to the strategy, where do you see the biggest divides between the President and the other members of NATO?</s>SANGER: Well it's probably over Russia, most of them, with the possible exception oddly enough of President Macron himself has been fairly strong on the question that Russia does not get back into the G-7 - what became the G-8 until they resolve the issues that led to their ouster in 2014, which was the invasion of the eastern part of Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea. The President seems to just want to get them back in without having reached any particular agreements or concessions there. Most of the rest of NATO considers, particularly the eastern countries in NATO, consider Russian aggression to be their number one issue. But president kept talking about having missions elsewhere in the world, including some vague idea around China. It wasn't clear from what he said that he understood that NATO had been an active participant in Afghanistan and, of course, in the Balkans and so forth. This whole idea of being out of area is not exactly new, it's more than 20 years old.</s>NOBILO: And in the back of the President's mind, presumably all the time, at the moment is the specter of the 2020 election. How invested and interested are Americans in NATO and in America's role in it?</s>SANGER: Not especially. I think that for Mr. Trump's base he wants to be able to do two things. He wants to go out and say I've gotten European countries to pay more so you don't have to and that gets big cheers. And he talked about going into stadiums and getting cheered on these issues in his sit down with President Macron today. But I think the second issue is, he wants to be able to cite some foreign policy wins. It's unlikely to get much out of North Korea and Iran. So he does want to say I revitalized NATO. I turned it from an obsolete institution into an active one. But these divisions about what NATO should be doing, which is by the way a fight that precedes Donald Trump by many, many years, is hardly one in which the President's taken the lead. And when Macron said that NATO was brain dead, what he meant was that, this was a criticism of the United States and President Trump for pulling back, and for the uncertainty about whether NATO - whether the United States would be there if NATO countries were attacked.</s>NOBILO: David Sanger, thank you very much for joining us to break all of that down.</s>SANGER: Great to be with you.</s>NOBILO: When THE BRIEF returns, how some grammar enthusiasts are admitting defeat, saying, ignorance and laziness have won.