Donald Trump says there are conditions that must be met before the U.S. helps its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
“If they fulfill their obligations to us, the answer is yes,” he said of aiding NATO partners in a New York Times interview published late Wednesday.
{mosads}“This is not 40 years ago,” the GOP presidential nominee added. “We are spending a fortune on military in order to lose $800 billion. That doesn’t sound very smart to me.
“To me, ‘America First’ is a brand-new, modern term. I never related it to the past. We are going to take care of this country first before we worry about everyone else in the world.”
The Times said Trump was specifically responding to whether he would help the Baltic states should Russia attack them.
Trump said he would decide if such allies deserved help based on how they fulfilled their treaty obligations first.
Trump added he would reconsider the forward deployment of American troops abroad and the nation’s weapons arsenal.
“If we decide we have to defend the United States, we can always deploy and it will be a lot less expensive,” he said of U.S. soil. “We have a lot of obsolete weapons. We have nuclear that we don’t even know if it works.”