NATO Is Doing Good, Better Than Ever, Because Of Our President, Best Ever

It would be nice if the President understood how NATO works. It really would be.

These are the President's comments after NATO - from the official White House press releases...

As you know, NATO was suffering very badly from depletion of funds, and it was going down like a rollercoaster goes down.  Not up, but down.  And I was able to, over the last couple of years, increase their contribution — not the United States, because we were paying far more than anybody else, to put it mildly.  It was really getting ridiculous.
And over the last couple years, I had them increase by $130 billion.  And then, over the next couple of years — and this was done largely over these last two days, but also set up time before that — they had to now contribute $400 billion more.  So it’s a total of $530 billion other countries will be putting into NATO.  And NATO now is very financially sound.  It’s very strong.  Far greater than anybody ever thought.

That is a lot to unpack.

Let's start in the first sentence. NATO was NOT suffering from a depletion of funds. It is true that many NATO nations were not (and most are not) meeting their Defense spending commitments. This is NOT money TO NATO. It means that the percentage of national spending on defense was below 2%. That money does NOT go to NATO. It goes into their own military.

The money spent on defense spending was not 2%, but it wasn't "going down". Not "going down" like a rollerocaster or anything else. It was slightly increasing.

So it is NOT $130 billion (much less $530 billion) going into NATO. It is going into their defense budgets.

He has been explained this many times. So either he is stupid or he thinks Americans are stupid (unfortunately this appears to be correct - we are stupid).