Gregory Korte

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — President Trump will travel to Brussels in May for a NATO summit, the White House said Tuesday.

The announcement comes as Trump has roiled the alliance with renewed complaints about how much European allies are paying for their defense. But administration officials say the U.S. has a "strong commitment" to the alliance.

In a meeting at the White House with German Chancellor Angela Merkel last week, Trump suggested that allies owe "vast sums of money from past years."

He followed up that meeting with a tweet demanding that "the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!"

Those statements reflected a shift in U.S. policy. At the most recent NATO summits in Wales and Poland, nations agreed to spend at least 2% of their economic output on defense by 2024, but the agreement was not retrospective and the money is not owed to the United States. "There is no debt account in NATO," German defense minister Ursula von der Leyen said Sunday.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday that Trump "looks forward to meeting with his NATO counterparts to reaffirm our strong commitment to NATO." But he also alluded to two issues where Trump has been critical of the alliance, saying Trump hoped to "discuss issues critical to the alliance, especially allied responsibility-sharing and NATO’s role in the fight against terrorism."

READ MORE:

Trump-Putin bromance unnerves the Baltics: David Andelman

Pence 'expects our allies to keep their word' on NATO costs

Trump tells Germany's Merkel he backs NATO if others contribute

Also Tuesday, the State Department said Rex Tillerson would be the first secretary of State to skip a meeting with NATO foreign ministers for the first time in 14 years, raising more questions about the U.S. commitment to the 68-year-old alliance. Instead, Tillerson will travel to Russia, NATO's chief rival, amid an FBI investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 election.

But from lecterns across Washington Tuesday, the Trump administration professed support for NATO. "The United States remains 100% committed to NATO. President Trump said this in his very first address to a joint session of Congress. He said our commitment to NATO is unwavering and it remains so," State Department spokesman Mark Toner said.

At the Pentagon, secretary of Defense James Mattis met with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. "We have a very strong trans-Atlantic bond. It's getting stronger," Mattis said. "It's built on a legacy of common commitments and common defense, and we never forget that in this building."

The White House said Trump would meet with Stoltenberg at the White House on April 12.