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AP Photo Cotton: Trump and I share similar questions on NATO

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton on Friday discussed his participation in a meeting with Donald Trump earlier this week, remarking that he and the Republican presidential frontrunner have similar concerns when it comes to the United States' role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

"You know, he had spoken earlier that day to The Washington Post editorial board and raised some serious questions about NATO. I share some of those questions," Cotton said in an interview with MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "We used to split our costs 50/50 between the U.S. and Europe. Today, it’s 70-30 between the U.S. and Europe."

At the same time, Cotton said he has different ideas than Trump in prescribing a solution.

"Now, I would have a different approach. Rather than reducing our spending on what’s a critical national security alliance, I would urge European leaders, as I have for four years, to increase their spending, specifically, so we can stop the kind of terrorist attacks we’ve seen in Paris and Brussels, so we don’t see in our eastern NATO partners, Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania, the kinds of hybrid warfare that we have seen in Ukraine and Georgia," said Cotton, who was one of the attendees of a meeting at the Jones Day law firm on Monday. "So he identified a serious problem that I’ve tried to address with some of my colleagues. I just had a slightly different solution for that problem.”

During his meeting with the Post, Trump said NATO as a concept was "good" but that the "distribution of costs has to be changed." Trump kept pressing the issue on Thursday, tweeting, "We pay a disproportionate share of the cost of N.A.T.O. Why? It is time to renegotiate, and the time is now!"

Asked whether he could see Trump as president, Cotton replied in the affirmative.

“Well I think he could be the commander in chief," the senator said. "He’s one of our leading candidates, and as I said, any of our candidates right now would be a better commander in chief, they’d be a more serious leader for our country than Hillary Clinton is, who has not only been the architect for Barack Obama’s foreign policy, which has left the world aflame but also shown such a casual disregard for the handling of sensitive national security secrets that I believe she’s disqualified for being the commander in chief.”

