No one is PAYING to be in NATO, it's a SPENDING percentage.

The NATO's 2% 'rule', established in 2014, was not a rule in the legal sense.
It was a political commitment by NATO members to aim to SPEND at least 2%
of their GDP on defense.
You are correct that many the NATO members didn't spend what they had pledged. In 2023, the average was 1.8% of GDP, excluding the US, including the US, it was 2.6 % of GDP.

Here is why: NATO was created to ensure peace in the NATO area.
It was a combined force against Russia, while they were an ally in WW2. WHY?
That was only the US forcing everyone else to pick your side and NOT Russia's.
The US didn't like communism, wanted it to fail, and united everyone against it.
As a result, the US became the dominant military power and economic power.

Why did the US SPEND so much more that the rest of NATO?
Because the US didn't spend on DEFENSE, but on OFFENSE.
The US has been attacking countries all over the world,
and the reason was to dominate the world's resources (oil).
The US toppled governments that didn't sell the oil cheap enough.
You built military bases all over the world, to control everyone.
That was very expensive, but that is mostly for the benefit of the US.
Many Europeans didn't want their money to be used for waging war,
with heavy civilian deaths, against countries that hadn't attacked us.

Another big part of the US's 'defense' budget was primarily used for SPYING, even on European allies. The NSA has been stealing the EU citizens' personal data and our industry's intellectual property. The US has made sure that you dominated the digital infrastructure, making everyone else dependent and vulnerable. This has been a joined effort by your government that wanted people's data and your corporations that can make huge profits from people's data, and gullible citizens who give away their data willingly, to see cat videos, vent their anger on a forum,
or have their biases confirmed by some grifter. This has favored the US massively.

Meanwhile, the US heavily encouraged European countries to buy weapons from the US, instead of producing them ourselves. That resulted in our spending going directly to your military industrial complex. Since the citizens of liberal countries didn't want their pension money going to the manufacture of cluster bombs, that conflict with the Geneva convention, EU countries did fall into trouble coming up with the funding to spend the 2% of the GDP they pledged. The EU citizens didn't like how their money was being used. We actually live in a DEMOCRACY.

[Fun fact, in my country, it was mostly when our right-wing party controlled politics, when funds for the defense spending were cut the most. That was under Rutte,
who is now NATO Secretary-General. He is now telling everyone that daddy Trump is right, while he led our country to cut the defense spending the most.]

However, the NATO members were still spending roughly $430 billion, excluding the US, while Russia was spending around $140 billion. That would have been more than enough to defend us against an attack on the EU. Understand that before Russia attacked Ukraine, there was good reason to think that the Russians would be stupid enough to attack the EU, because the EU bought most of their fossil fuels, which was about half of their income. We were building Nord Stream 2 with them, at the time. Russia had a GDP just a bit bigger than the GDP of Italy. The GDP of the EU was 7.3X bigger than that of Russia.

The attack on Ukraine was not an attack on the EU, or on NATO, but it was certainly a provocation. No one invoked NATO, the EU just assumed that defending Ukraine, against the former biggest enemy of the US, would be in the US's best interest. Maybe you can explain why it doesn't seem that way?
Can you explain that anyway else than that Trump personally likes Putin and that
Trump seems to have lots of financial ties to Russia?

A challenge to you, is to read my reaction without your American bias.

When you say something, do you ever factcheck yourself?
Or do you just call me a liar, on what you have been told to believe?

You only presented ONE real argument to call me stupid; the percentages.
I have explained the spending difference. SHOW ME WRONG, on anything I said.
Do NOT just SAY I'm wrong or stupid, present verifiable facts that contradict me.
Be transparant.

You're just shouting random insults. Useless.

The US never wanted Europe to grow a pair of balls before.
You just wanted Europe to BUY lots of YOUR weapons.
Which could be easily withheld from us, if it served YOU.
Now we want to buy lots of those weapons, but you're not delivering enough.
And your argument is clearly: "We don't want to risk war with Russia for YOU!"

We cannot create a military industrial complex like yours, in a few short years.

What am I talking about? Here is an example:
The Netherlands currently has about 47 F-35 fighter jets (Officially ordered: 52).
The software is provided by the US. Without regular updates the jet doesn’t just get “a bit worse”, it loses combat relevance very fast. Certain weapons and modes are software-locked. No update = no authorization = no use. Sustainment systems (ALIS → ODIN) are US-controlled. They affect maintenance, diagnostics, and readiness. If the US doesn't like how we use our F-35s, you can just 'pull the plug'.

And that's for a country that was a “Level 2” partner in the development of the F-35. The Netherlands joined the F-35 (JSF) development program early, as far back as the early 2000s, and signed onto the System Development and Demonstration (SDD) phase with other partner countries. More than 90 Dutch companies and institutions are involved in the F-35 program. Because of this investment and industrial participation, the Netherlands isn’t just a customer, it's one of the official partner countries in the F-35 program, alongside the United Kingdom and Italy
(the UK is Level 1).

My Socialist Party was against the JSF program at the time. We wanted to buy
the Saab JAS 39 Gripen. We wanted to be independent from the US.

It is Elon Musk Ai system. I find it very useful in things I do outside of this forum and decided to try it for something like what I ask it about you.
only registered users can see external links
Try it with a question that is legit to you that may be difficult to answer and the reply might surprise you. I spent hours the other night googling something and never found shit. Keyed in what I was looking for and why and Grok found the info I needed and spelled it out.

The cell phone was invented in 1973, by Martin Cooper, an engineer at Motorola,
in the US.
The first Inactivated Polio Vaccine (IPV), the “Salk vaccine”, was developed by Jonas Salk in the US, in 1955.
Israel has indeed played a very significant role in the development of modern medicine, particularly in medical technology, pharmaceuticals, and innovative treatments, for such a small country. The 98% number is nonsense though.
Israel was founded in 1948. Here is a list of all the "medical arts" that were developed before Israel even existed:

Surgical & Diagnostic Technology:
- Antiseptic surgery techniques (using carbolic acid/phenol): – UK
- X-rays (radiography): – Germany
- Electrocardiogram (ECG/EKG): – Netherlands
- Blood transfusion techniques: – UK / France
- Insulin for diabetes treatment: – Canada
- Penicillin (first mass-produced antibiotic): – UK

Vaccines & Immunology:
- Smallpox vaccine (variolation then Jenner’s vaccine): – UK
- Rabies vaccine (Pasteur’s development): – France
- Diphtheria antitoxin: – Germany / France
- Tetanus antitoxin: – Germany

Medical Devices:
- Sphygmomanometer (blood pressure cuff): – Italy
- Stethoscope: – France
- Thermometer for clinical use: – Germany / UK
- Hypodermic syringe: – France / UK

Microbiology & Laboratory Medicine:
- Germ theory of disease: – France / Germany
- Pasteurization (applied to medical microbiology): – France
- Bacterial culture techniques: – Germany
- Blood typing (ABO system): – Austria

Anesthesia & Pain Management:
- Ether anesthesia: – USA
- Chl0roform anesthesia: – UK

The Dutch have been creating cities all over the world, before Israel even existed.
"olive branches"? I can do without, but olive oil comes from Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco, Portugal and parts of California. Israel is well outside
the top 10 countries producing the most olive oil.
I've heard that Israel is very nice. My grandparents once visited it. I also want it to stay nice. To protect that, they didn't need to do what they did. They could have done that, while sharing the region with the other people who have lived there for
a very long time. Genetically, there isn't even a difference between the Muslim inhabitants and the Jewish inhabitants who never left to other countries. It's just a conflict between religions, started by the State of Israel, that was created very much biased in favor of the Jewish religion. That was not necessary, and it created all the problems afterwards. It is also one of the reasons for conflicts between The West and the Middle East. The US keeps stoking that fire, and one way is to keep sending Israel lots of money, without demanding any peace effort in return. It's not MY fucking money though, and I see no answer to my question why you should care about Israel.

Greece is a paradise, it's the birth-place of science, philosophy and mythology,
it has been very peaceful and it exports lots of olive oil, all as you claim about Israel.
The EU supported it with lots of loans, when they had the debt crisis, but we required them to follow lots of rules in return. And we wouldn't support them,
when they, e.g. kill all the Turks on Cyprus and take the island for themselves.