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By Peter Aitken
Politics Weekend Editor
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President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday addressed the condition he would need to remain in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as the military bloc takes on renewed importance in a post-Biden political era.
Trump has been deeply critical of NATO for years, with The New York Times reporting in early 2019 that he had privately said "several times" the previous year that he wanted to pull the United States out of the alliance.
Although not expected to do so once he steps back into the Oval Office in January, officials in Europe are bracing for firm demands on how much of their gross domestic product (GDP) is funneled into NATO.
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The U.S., with its extensive military and nuclear weapons stockpiles, has traditionally shouldered much of the burden for providing some of Europe's capabilities, including space-based intelligence and logistics.
Trump addressed NATO with Kristen Welker, host of NBC News' Meet the Press, during his first post-election network interview, which aired Sunday morning.
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Trump claimed that the military alliance "takes advantage of the U.S.," reiterating much of what he's previously said about it, which has remained in place after World War II ended as the chief deterrent to Russian ambitions.
"Number one, they take advantage of us on trade, meaning the European nations—they don't take our cars, they don't take our food product, they don't take anything. It's a disgrace," Trump said. "And, on top of that, we defend them, so it's a double whammy."
"So let me just tell you. I was able to get hundreds of billions of dollars put into NATO just by a tough attitude," the president-elect said. "I told the countries, 'I'm not going to protect you unless you pay,' and they started paying. That amounted to more than $600 billion. That's a big thing, otherwise they wouldn't be fighting, they wouldn't have any money to fight."
"If they're paying their bills, and if I think they're treating us fairly, absolutely, I would stay with NATO," he stressed on Sunday.
A spokesperson for the Trump transition team on Sunday morning referred Newsweek "back to the President's comments" in response to a request for comment.
Newsweek reached out to NATO by email on Sunday morning for comment.
The exchange takes on new meaning in light of Syria's collapse as rebels took Damascus overnight on Saturday, toppling a 50-year regime that ended with Bashar al-Assad's seeming escape from the country.
The Russian foreign ministry said that Assad had "left the country." Russia, a long-standing and key Assad ally, already took in the former Syrian president's wife and children last week.
Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Sunday morning that Russia "was not interested in protecting" Assad "any longer," insisting that "there was no reason for Russia to be there in the first place...because of Ukraine, where close to 600,000 Russian soldiers lay wounded or dead, in a war that should never have started, and could go on forever."
Trump also wrote that Russia and Iran "are in a weakened state right now, one because of Ukraine and a bad economy, the other because of Israel and its fighting success."
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