Schulz to Trump: Forget about 2 percent defense spending

'German social democracy has always put an emphasis on disarmament. This is what you can expect from Chancellor Schulz.'

Martin Schulz, chancellor candidate of the German Social Democrats (SPD) | Steffi Loos/Getty Images

BERLIN — If elected German chancellor in the coming election, Martin Schulz intends to disregard U.S. President Donald Trump’s demands for Germany to increase its military spending to 2 percent of gross domestic product, he said Monday.

“I don’t take the view it was agreed among NATO members that we have to reach this goal of [spending] 2 percent of our GDP on armament,” the candidate for the Social Democrats (SPD) said.

The members of the military alliance issued a declaration in 2014 that mentioned “considerations [to] move towards the 2 percent guideline [of GDP] within a decade with a view to meeting their NATO Capability Targets and filling NATO’s capability shortfalls.”

“German social democracy has always put an emphasis on disarmament.” — Martin Schulz

“If I interpret this correctly, it was just said that one can aim for it,” the former European Parliament president said. “To spend an additional €20 billion on defense … is certainly not the goal a government led by me would pursue.”

The message was intended both as a signal to German voters and as a shot across the bow of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has said Germany would do “everything we can in order to fulfill this commitment.”

“What we need isn’t an arms race, it’s initiatives for disarmament, as described by [SPD] Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel,” Schulz said. “We primarily need more investment in preventive measures.” The SPD candidate added that, rather, it was important for Germany to reach the United Nations target of devoting 0.7 percent of the gross national income on development aid.

“German social democracy has always put an emphasis on disarmament,” he said. “This is what you can expect from Chancellor Schulz.”

Berlin currently spends around 1.2 percent of GDP on defense, compared with Washington’s 3.6 percent. Were Germany to meet the NATO spending target, its military budget would jump from €37 billion currently to somewhere around €60 billion, making it the largest military power in Europe.

More military not a goal

In September, Germans elect a new parliament. Schulz’s plan for his Social Democrats — currently Merkel’s junior partner in the government — is to become the strongest party in the Bundestag and to push Merkel out of office.

Increasingly, the issue of Germany’s military spending is emerging as one of the central foreign policy topics of the campaign. Two-thirds of Germans oppose spending more on defense, according to a December 2016 poll by Forsa.

“There are no questions that our soldiers — in order to be able to do their job as a reliable partner — need to be equipped reasonably and that our army needs to have sufficient means to fulfill its task, possibly even more than they do currently,” Schulz said. “However, I don’t regard it as the primary goal of German foreign policy to end up with a highly armed military in the center of Europe.”

Trump has told Germany and other NATO members that they must accelerate their efforts to meet the 2 percent spending target. At a news conference last month in Washington, following a meeting with Merkel, Trump said there is a “need for our NATO allies to pay their fair share for the cost of defense,” adding a day later on Twitter — inaccurately — that Germany owed America “vast sums of money” for NATO.

“There is no debt account at NATO,” German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, a senior member of Merkel’s Christian Democrats, shot back a day later, adding that it was wrong to link the NATO target solely to expenditure for the military alliance; defense spending, von der Leyen said, also went “into U.N. peacekeeping missions, into our European missions and into our contribution to the fight against IS terrorism.”

Earlier this month, Merkel stressed once more that she is committed to Germany continuously raising its military budget, dodging the question of whether this would mean the country would reach the 2 percent target.

Next year, German military spending is set to rise to €38.5 billion, projected to represent 1.26 percent of the country’s economic output that year, compared to its defense spending ratio of 1.18 percent in 2016.

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