Trump's appearance at the NATO summit in his first trip outside the United States generated many themes for the march. Greenpeace used a variation of Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again" for its massive banners: "Make Peace Great Again" and another banner hanging from a crane near the NATO headquarters with the motto "#RESIST."
Trump's misogynist statements compelled the Pink p*ssy Hats to return to the streets of Brussels with two large groups of women and men challenging his rebuke to women. Peace groups from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Belgium challenged the NATO war machine
Photo by Ann Wright
125 persons were arrested for blocking a highway leading to the NATO ministerial meeting.
After calling NATO "obsolete" during his presidential campaign, Trump faced the other 27 nations in NATO by saying that "NATO is no longer obsolete" and "You owe us a lot of money." The media has widely reported that the NATO meeting schedule was dramatically shortened to accommodate Trump's short attention span. Presentations by country representatives were mandated to four minutes or less.
Only five of 28 members (US, UK, Poland, Estonia and Greece) have 2 percent of their national budgets dedicated to military expenditures and Trump railed at member countries for not budgeting more. The overall spending on defense by NATO countries will be more than $921 billion http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/2
while $1.4 billion goes to NATO to funds some NATO operations, training and research and the NATO strategic command center.
Trump's proposed increase of 5,000 U.S. military into Afghanistan will increase by one-third the NATO presence in Afghanistan and he is urging other NATO countries to increase their presence. Currently, there are 13,000 NATO forces including 8,500 U.S. in Afghanistan.
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