President Donald Trump unleashed a pair of furious attacks on NATO allies Thursday, July 2, 2026, accusing them of freeloading off American military spending while offering a graph that fundamentally misrepresents how the alliance’s finances actually work.

Trump’s grievances spanned nearly the entire day. He opened with a morning post on Truth Social at 8:01 a.m. ET, listing defense spending figures by country and denouncing the disparity as “Ridiculous!” Then, just before 11 p.m. ET, he returned to the platform to deliver a second, sharper broadside. Trump wrote, “Ridiculous for the U.S.A. to continue along this one sided path when the relationship is not reciprocal. They were not there for us!!!” Both posts were accompanied by a graph showing the United States contributing $999 billion, followed by the United Kingdom at $90.5 billion, France at $66.5 billion, Italy at $48.8 billion, and Poland at $44.3 billion, with Germany described as falling far short even of those figures.

A Graph That Conflates Two Different Things

The figures Trump cited reflect what each country spends on its own national military — not what any of them pays directly into NATO’s shared budgets. According to the alliance, defense expenditure consists of funds a national government allocates to maintain its military forces, support its partners, or contribute to collective operations. The common NATO budget, which funds headquarters operations and certain joint military and civilian costs, totals only a few billion dollars annually, with the American share at about 22 percent.

The $999 billion figure Trump assigned to the United States appears to correspond to the defense budget he requested for 2026 under his One Big Beautiful Bill Act — a figure that encompasses America’s vast global military commitments well beyond Europe. The same logic applies to the other countries on his chart: the United Kingdom’s $90.5 billion, France’s $66.5 billion, Italy’s $48.8 billion, and Poland’s $44.3 billion are each nation’s total defense budget, not their NATO contributions. Because the figures measure fundamentally different things, the comparison cannot support claims about relative burden-sharing within the alliance.

Iran War Tensions Fuel the Outburst

Behind Trump’s spending complaints lies a deeper frustration over the war in Iran, which he launched without congressional approval and to which most NATO allies declined to contribute. During a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte last month, Trump said the alliance had let the United States down even though American forces had demolished Iran within the first week of the conflict, according to his account. In the early weeks of fighting, Italy refused to permit American bombers to use its military bases for transit to the Middle East, and Spain closed its airspace to U.S. planes involved in strikes on Iran. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in May that the president’s disappointment over allied responses to Middle East operations was well documented and would need to be addressed at the upcoming Ankara summit.

NATO Spending Targets and the Road to Turkey

Thursday’s outburst arrived days before NATO heads of state convened in Ankara on July 7 for a summit that Secretary of State Marco Rubio said could be tense. The meeting already carries significant baggage. At a NATO summit in The Hague in June 2025, all member states except Spain committed to dedicating five percent of their economic output to defense and security by 2035, with at least 3.5 percent directed toward core military needs — a dramatic escalation from the two percent target that NATO members first agreed to pursue in 2014. Trump celebrated that agreement as a major American victory, but the alliance’s reluctance to follow his lead into Iran has clearly sharpened his grievances since The Hague summit.

Trump’s habit of blurring the distinction between national defense budgets and direct NATO contributions is not new. For years, he has overstated America’s financial burden within the alliance, at various points claiming the United States shoulders as much as 90 percent of NATO’s costs — a figure that does not withstand scrutiny. The U.S. military budget comprises roughly 70 percent of the combined defense spending of all NATO nations, a proportion driven largely by America’s worldwide commitments rather than its European obligations alone. That context has done little to temper Trump’s rhetoric, and Thursday’s double-barreled social media offensive suggested it was unlikely to before the Ankara summit.

The summit got underway Tuesday, July 7, in Ankara as Trump arrived at Etimesgut Air Base, where he was met by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan before the two held a bilateral meeting. Trump immediately set a confrontational tone, telling reporters he was “very disappointed with NATO” and adding that he might not have attended at all had the summit been held anywhere other than Turkey. Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the gathering as “probably the most important meeting in NATO’s history.”

Early on, Trump said he would lift certain economic sanctions on Turkey and suggested he might consider permitting Ankara to reenter the F-35 fighter jet program, which had barred it in 2019 following its purchase of Russian military equipment.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said allies were signing defense deals worth “literally billions of dollars” at the summit, including a plan for NATO to procure five high-altitude surveillance drones from Northrop Grumman and $40 billion in counter-drone investments over the next five years

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is attending the summit as well, his presence made more urgent after Russian missile and drone strikes on Kyiv over the weekend killed 19 people in Kyiv and at least 26 across the capital region. 

The summit closed July 8 with the Ankara Summit Declaration, pledging €70 billion in military aid for Ukraine in 2026. Trump then declared his Iran ceasefire “over”; U.S. strikes on Iran resumed hours after he left Ankara. He also ordered Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to cut off trade with Spain, the only ally refusing the 5% target. 

Trump held bilateral meetings with Zelenskyy and Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa on Wednesday, July 8, before departing Ankara. He told Zelenskyy the U.S. would grant Ukraine a license to produce Patriot interceptors and buy Ukrainian-made drones, though he acknowledged the manufacturers had not been informed. After meeting al-Sharaa, Rubio said the administration would soon remove Syria from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.