Germany should “shut their damn mouths” on NATO spending, a conservative commentator at a leading US think tank has said. Heritage Foundation president Dr Kevin Roberts also took aim at Germany for its role in both World Wars during a wide ranging interview with journalists on Wednesday. His remarks come amid rising tensions with Berlin over demands for Washington to send more weaponry to Ukraine.
Dr Roberts said: “I will be clear, there needs to be some increase in defence spending on particular programmes that are the right munitions programmes, the right planes, the right tanks, whatever the materiel may be.
“That needs to be tied to Congress, not the President of the United States, Congress telling our NATO allies ‘it’s time to pony up’.
“And chief among them would not of course be your wonderful countrymen, who are as heroic as Americans at this, but our friends in Germany who not only say one thing and do the other but then they dan
e to wag their finger at the United States when they have sparked two World Wars in the last century.
“I can’t tell you how livid American conservatives, starting with me, are about that and Heritage is going to drive very hard until we see the Germans, in particular, forced by our Congress to pull their weight and shut their damn mouths.”
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American-German relations seemed to hit a high-point last week when President Joe Biden and Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced sending battle tanks to Ukraine.
However, the announcement came following tense negotiations as Germany would only send tanks if the US followed suit.
Jake Sullivan, US national security adviser, was also said to have read the “riot act” to the Chancellor’s foreign policy adviser Jens Plotner.
Despite initially citing logistic concerns, a White House official later said: “It was important to the President to preserve unity and deliver for Ukraine.”
Only nine out of 30 NATO members were expected to meet the two percent target in 2022, the House of Commons Library has revealed.
Romania, France, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Netherlands, Albania, Norway, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Germany, Denmark, Czechia, Canada, Turkey, Slovenia, Belgium, Spain and Luxembourg were all estimated to miss the threshold.
However, Berlin set out its own plans to boost defence spending to two percent of GDP through a £85 billion special fund for military equipment modernisation.
Despite never reaching the target, Germany is currently the third largest contributor to NATO, after the United States and United Kingdom.
