In 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron expressed doubt about the effectiveness of Article 5 of the NATO Treaty which stipulates that an attack on one member state is “an attack on all of its members”.
france has apparently made it clear that it strongly opposes NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg's idea that member states should jointly fund more of the alliance's work, Reuters reported on Friday.
The source added that for the French government, “it is not an issue of NATO versus Europe but NATO versus the national defence of each member state”.
With france already meeting NATO's target to spend 2% of its GDP on the alliance's defence budget, Paris is still open to hearing counter-arguments and details pertaining to Stoltenberg's proposal, according to the insider.
Stoltenberg Calls for Increasing NATO Funding
The remarks followed the NATO chief pledging in February that he would call on the member states' defence ministers “to increase NATO's funding” for the alliance's “core deterrence and defence activities”.
He insisted that “spending more together” would demonstrate “the strength” of member states' commitment to defend each other under the NATO Treaty's Article 5.
Reuters also quoted several unnamed diplomats as saying that the proposal is seen as a response to the EU's long-standing tensions with the US, who has repeatedly accused its European allies of failing to contribute enough to their own…
