Al Arabiya English presenter: Boosting NATO’s defense spending

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Transcript

00:00Melinda, it's been trending on Twitter all day and also the fact that Marco Rubio laughed about it a little bit later on

00:08when Donald Trump was asked about the daddy comments.

00:11So something that's been causing a bit of a stir on social media.

00:16But the other big focus of this year's Leaders Summit was the agreement to boost defence spending.

00:22This has been a hot topic. Can you break it down for us?

00:26Yeah, well, maybe NATO's daddy had to put his foot down when it came to defence spending as well

00:32because this has been a real sticking point for the US President Donald Trump.

00:36If you cast your minds back to 2018, this was the point where he said the US could walk

00:43if other European countries didn't stump up more defence spending.

00:47And even though there was a lot of concern leading into the summit, they do seem to have gotten it over the line.

00:54It's going to be an increase from the current 2% defence spending target to 5% of GDP.

01:03But there is a little bit of creative accounting here because it is actually only 3.5% of GDP on actual front line spending.

01:14So that's things like ammunition, weaponry, missile defence, that sort of front line protection and boots on the ground weaponry.

01:25The extra 1.5% is on what they're terming defence infrastructure.

01:30So that's what they're saying.