FRANCE 24 spoke to NATO Supreme Allied Commander Transformation – Admiral Pierre Vandier. While US President Trump has publicly questioned his country’s commitment to NATO, Vandier said Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had pledged before the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s top decision-making body, that the US was fully committed to the Alliance. “He was very clear on his commitments in NATO“, Vandier asserted. “The US is just arguing about a better NATO, a more efficient and more lethal NATO, which I think everybody concurs with,” he added.
In addition, Vandier pointed out that he had already received US contribution to future defence planning that will be presented at the NATO summit scheduled in June in The Hague.
“The US are just arguing about a better NATO, a more efficient and more lethal NATO, which I think everybody concurs with”, Pierre Vandier told FRANCE 24.
‘Collective defense’ not ‘US defense’
US President Donald Trump has called for NATO’s 32 member states to spend 5 percent of their GDP on defence, up from the existing target of 2 percent.
During a summit in Warsaw, in mid-January, the defence ministers of Germany, France, Britain, Italy, and Poland — Europe’s five largest military spenders — said they plan to keep investing more in defence but that meeting Trump’s NATO spending target would be tough.
In fact, “one must understand how deep has been the disinvestment in defence during 30 years” Vandier said. “So today there is a huge effort and the US is just saying we need you to do that effort. A collective defence is not a US defence. It needs the stakeholders, the members of the alliance to do their jobs”.
Russia ‘a long-term threat’
With Trump back in the Oval Office, there is also concern on whether Russia, which is seen as the number one threat by NATO, is still seen as such in Washington right now.
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“Looking at NATO perspective, Russia is still a threat. It’s a long term threat because the architecture of security inside Europe has been partly destroyed. And so the eastern countries (in Europe) feel under pressure and they have to be defended. It’s what NATO is about”, Vandier said.
But is this protection equal to the threats? According to CNN estimates, Russia now produces as much ammunition in a month as all the NATO countries put together produce in a year.
“Today we rediscover asymmetric threats and the fact that you need mass, you need weapons. You need ammo to deal with this”, Vandier said.
“We don’t have that much time to be able to have a stronger NATO, a more lethal NATO, in order to prevent a bad events”, he warned.
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