Nato chief hails Trump for raising defence spending and Arctic security awareness

US president Donald Trump has been praised by Nato's secretary general for making alliance members agree to spend more on defence and take the threat to Arctic security more seriously.

Mark Rutte said there was no way Nato countries would have agreed to increase their spending levels to 2% of GDP had the US leader not intervened.

The secretary general was addressing a meeting of the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee and Security and Defence Committee.

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Chinese and Russians more active

Many at the meeting were keen to hear what Mr Rutte might say regarding Donald Trump's comments about Greenland.

However, Mr Rutte insisted he had no mandate to negotiate on this and had not done so.

Nevertheless, he did say Mr Trump had been right to highlight the issue of Arctic security.

"There is an issue of collective security because these sea lanes are opening up and because the Chinese and the Russians are more and more active," said the Nato chief.

"And clearly we have to address that, and that means when it comes to this question of capabilities, we will see in Nato how we can tackle this.

"We have a well-established process of capability-targeting, so we'll now look into how we can best do that.

"Taking that issue forward, the capabilities that we need, also to defend the Arctic, are step by step becoming part of the overall capability-targeting process.

More spending without Trump? No way!

"The 2% reached [defence spending of GDP] by all Nato countries now at the end of 2025 would never ever have happened without Trump," he told attendees.

"Do you really think that Spain and Italy and Belgium and Canada would have decided to move from 1.5 to 2% – Italy is spending €10bn more now on defence than at the beginning of the year – without President Trump?

"No way! It would not have happened."