Washington, 7 March 2025 (dpa/MIA) - US President Donald Trump has once again expressed doubts about the mutual defence clause of the NATO treaty.

"I think it's common sense. If they don't pay, I'm not going to defend them," Trump said in Washington on Thursday in response to a journalist's question on the matter.

Trump had already taken this position before – and, as he noted, "I got into a lot of heat when I said that ... Oh, he's violating NATO."

The US president stressed that the NATO partners are "friends of mine."

He questioned whether they would actually stand by the US in an emergency: "But if the United States was in trouble, and we called them, we said: we got a problem, France, we got a problem, couple of others, I won't mention. You think they're going to come and protect us? They're supposed to. I'm not so sure."

As a defence alliance, NATO relies on the principle of deterrence, and Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is particularly relevant in this regard. It regulates the alliance's mutual defence commitment and states that an armed attack against one or more allies will be considered an attack against all.

This collective defence clause has only been invoked once in NATO's history – in support of the US after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.

During his first term in office (2017–21), Trump threatened to withdraw the US from the military alliance if the partner countries did not fulfil their commitment to spend at least 2% of their gross domestic product on defence.

Since then, he has boasted that it was only his pressure that persuaded the NATO states to increase their spending. Now he is calling for defence spending of 5% of economic output.

However, all members of the alliance are far from reaching this target – including the US itself.

MIA file photo