Barely two weeks before the NATO summit 2018, Trump wanted to talk to Stoltenberg, who had then led NATO for four years. The mood was "more tense than ever", Stoltenberg tells in his book "My time in NATO".
"The President of the United States was angry. He no longer wanted to accept that Europe and Canada paid too little", writes the Norwegian according to Norwegian TV2.
At that time, Norway spent just over 1.6 percent of GDP on defense - a good bit below NATO's then goal of two percent. The imbalance annoyed Trump, then in his first term as President of the United States.
"It was the business mindset that prevailed”, writes Stoltenberg in the book, which is released on Wednesday but which several media have been allowed to read in advance.
"If Norway was not willing to pay for 'full NATO' maybe they should invest in 'half NATO', a looser connection like the one Sweden had. If you want 100 percent coverage, you have to pay the full insurance premium. That was his logic.”
When the summit finally took place, Trump threatened to pull the US out of the alliance if the other countries did not start paying more. It could have been the meeting where NATO was buried, writes Stoltenberg. But that's not what happened.
"The meeting had revealed a deep divide between the US and major countries in Europe. But we had managed to get away from the edge of the precipice."
