Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte defended US President Donald Trump\u2019s criticism of the transatlantic security alliance, while saying this year\u2019s summit showed \u201ca huge sense of unity\u201d and produced procurement plans worth tens of billions of dollars.<\/p>\n
During a press conference after the North Atlantic Council meeting of leaders at the Nato summit hosted by Turkey in Ankara on Wednesday, Rutte said this year\u2019s gathering had resulted in more than US$50 billion in procurement deals as part of efforts to meet the defence spending target of 5 per cent of GDP by 2035, agreed at last year\u2019s summit in The Hague.<\/p>\n
These investments will support Nato\u2019s capability targets across all domains, including deep precision strike, integrated air and missile defence, uncrewed systems, cutting-edge technologies and intelligence capabilities, as well as developing \u201cinteroperable transatlantic warfighting clout\u201d and adopting powerful AI models, Rutte said.<\/p>\n
He said that there was a \u201cgreat sense of unity\u201d among the leaders, who \u201cwarmly welcomed\u201d the leadership of Trump, whom he described as \u201ctransforming\u201d the alliance and making it \u201cstronger,\u201d where the member states pledged \u20ac70 billion (US$80 billion) in military equipment, assistance and training and \u201cunwavering support\u201d for Ukraine.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis summit has shown that the alliance is stronger than ever. An alliance that is united and ready to defend every edge of our territory,\u201d said Rutte.<\/p>\n
\u201cHere in Ankara, allies reaffirmed their ironclad commitment to collective defence under Article 5 that an attack on one is an attack on all, and we will stand together. Our unity, solidarity and collective strength remain the foundation of peace, security and prosperity.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte defended US President Donald Trump\u2019s criticism of the transatlantic security alliance, while saying…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7442,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[543,75,191,47,534,156,299,7,20,4384,187,2576,466,71,2519],"class_list":["post-7441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-ankara","tag-article","tag-china","tag-europe","tag-greenland","tag-iran","tag-mark-rutte","tag-nato","tag-russia","tag-south-korean-president-lee-jae-myung","tag-strait-of-hormuz","tag-the-hague","tag-turkey","tag-ukraine","tag-us-president-donald-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}