Decoding Trump’s UN Speech: Part 7 — NATO Spending and the Wedge of Unrealistic Demands
- john raymond
- Sep 24, 2025
- 2 min read
In his September 23 UN address, Trump returned to one of his favorite tools of division: NATO burden-sharing. He claimed that at the June NATO summit, allies had agreed to raise defense spending targets from 2% to 5% of GDP “at my request.”
The boast was about drawing lines in the sand as much as to be provocative. Trump knows full well that no major European government can realistically achieve such a level of military expenditure without severe political and economic fallout.
The point was never to achieve compliance but to set an impossible standard that will inevitably be missed.
That is the wedge. By forcing an unattainable target, Trump created the conditions for blame and recrimination inside the alliance. When the 5% is not met—and it will not be—he now has a ready-made narrative: Europe is failing, Europe is weak, Europe cannot be trusted.
He will then wield that narrative to deepen suspicions among NATO members, portraying some as freeloaders and others as cowards. What begins as a numerical demand metastasizes into distrust and backbiting.
The Raymond Method highlights the structure...
Pillar One (Regime Security): Trump positions himself as the only leader strong enough to extract concessions from allies, burnishing his image as NATO’s disciplinarian.
Pillar Two (Asymmetric Warfare): he weaponizes an arbitrary number to destabilize unity, converting a budgetary debate into a test of loyalty.
Byzantine Traitor-General paradigm: by setting allies up to fail, he ensures that their failure becomes evidence of betrayal, further corroding trust within the alliance.
The effect is corrosive by design. NATO is strongest when its members trust one another’s commitments. By pushing the 5% figure, Trump engineered the opposite.
The alliance will stumble under the weight of an impossible standard, and the inevitable shortfall will feed back into the broader strategy of fragmentation.
For Moscow, this is another strategic gift. A NATO divided by mutual suspicion is less capable of deterring Russian aggression. Trump’s goal is not to strengthen the alliance but to hollow it out from within, leaving only resentment in its place.
The 5% demand was never about defense spending. It was about manufacturing failure. It was about setting NATO against itself.
And it was about giving Trump a cudgel he can use again and again to weaken the West’s most important collective defense institution.
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