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NATO Alliance
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said Monday an American takeover of Greenland would amount to the end of the NATO military alliance. Her comments came in response to US President Donald Trump's renewed call for the strategic, mineral-rich Arctic island to come under US control in the aftermath of the weekend military operation in Venezuela. The dead-of-night operation by US forces in Caracas to capture leader Nicols Maduro and his wife early Saturday left the world stunned, and heightened concerns in Denmark and Greenland, which is a semiautonomous territory of the Danish kingdom and thus part of NATO. Frederiksen and her Greenlandic counterpart, Jens Frederik Nielsen, blasted the president's comments and warned of catastrophic consequences. Numerous European leaders expressed solidarity with them. If the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, Frederiksen told Danish broadcaster TV2 on Monday. That is, including our NATO and .
Two NATO-nation intelligence services suspect Russia is developing a new anti-satellite weapon to target Elon Musk's Starlink constellation with destructive orbiting clouds of shrapnel, with the aim of reining in Western space superiority that has helped Ukraine on the battlefield. Intelligence findings seen by The Associated Press say the so-called zone-effect weapon would seek to flood Starlink orbits with hundreds of thousands of high-density pellets, potentially disabling multiple satellites at once but also risking catastrophic collateral damage to other orbiting systems. Analysts who haven't seen the findings say they doubt such a weapon could work without causing uncontrollable chaos in space for companies and countries, including Russia and its ally China, that rely on thousands of orbiting satellites for communications, defence, and other vital needs. Such repercussions, including risks to its own space systems, could steer Moscow away from deploying or using such a weapon,
Germany has committed billions to beefing up its military's equipment after years of neglect. Now it's trying to persuade more people to join up and serve. More than 3 years after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine kick-started efforts to revitalise the Bundeswehr, the challenge of strengthening the German military has grown along with fears of the threat from Moscow. Alongside the higher military spending that Germany and NATO allies agreed on this year, the alliance is encouraging members to increase personnel numbers. Berlin wants to add tens of thousands of service members. Chancellor Friedrich Merz says that because of its size and its economic strength, Germany is the country that must have the strongest conventional army in NATO on the European side. He hasn't defined that goal in detail, but the tone underscores a shift in a country that emerged only gradually from its post-World War II military reticence after reunification in 1990. Earlier this month, the military's
NATO allies on Tuesday will hold formal consultations at Estonia's request after the Baltic country said that three Russian fighter jets entered its airspace last week without authorisation. Russia's Defence Ministry denied the accusation. The intrusion on Friday lasted 12 minutes and was a fresh test of the military alliance's ability to respond to Moscow's airborne threats after around 20 Russian drones entered Polish airspace on September 10. NATO's 32 ambassadors meet most weeks in a format known as the North Atlantic Council at the military alliance's headquarters in Brussels. Estonia has requested consultations under Article 4 of NATO's founding treaty. Poland also requested Article 4 talks after the drone incident, and two days later, NATO launched an operation, dubbed Eastern Sentry, to bolster the organization's military presence with European aircraft and other defences along its eastern flank. However, Article 4 talks do not mean automatic military or diplomatic ...
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte was upbeat that the military organisation will agree on massive spending hikes at a transformational summit on Wednesday, as member state leaders including US President Donald Trump assembled in The Netherlands. Leaders of the 32-nation alliance are expected to agree a new defense spending target of 5 per cent of gross domestic product, as the United States NATO's biggest-spending member shifts its attention away from Europe to focus on security priorities elsewhere. So a transformational summit. Looking forward to it, Rutte told reporters in The Hague, before chairing the meeting's only working session, which was expected to last less than three hours. But ahead of the meeting, Spain announced that it would not be able to reach the target by the new 2035 deadline, calling it unreasonable. Belgium signalled that it would not get there either, and Slovakia said it reserves the right to decide its own defence spending. Rutte conceded that these ar
President Donald Trump on Wednesday will meet with members of a NATO alliance that he has worked to bend to his will over the years and whose members are rattled by his latest comments casting doubt on the US commitment to its mutual defence guarantees. Trump's comments en route to the Netherlands that his fidelity to Article 5 depends on your definition" are likely to draw a spotlight at the NATO summit, as will the new and fragile Iran-Israel ceasefire that Trump helped broker after the US unloaded airstrikes on Iran's nuclear facilities. At the same time, the alliance is poised to enact one of Trump's chief priorities for NATO: a pledge by its member countries to increase, sometimes significantly, how much they spend on their defence. NATO was broke, and I said, You're going to have to pay,' Trump said Tuesday. And we did a whole thing, and now they're paying a lot. Then I said, You're going to have to lift it to 4 or 5 per cent, and 5 per cent is better. Spending 5 per cent of
US President Donald Trump and his NATO counterparts will meet formally Wednesday for a summit that could unite the world's biggest security organisation around a new defense spending pledge or widen divisions among the allies. Just a week ago, things had seemed rosy. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte was optimistic the European members and Canada would commit to invest at least as much of their economic growth on defense as the United States does for the first time. Then Spain rejected the new NATO target for each country to spend 5 per cent of its gross domestic product on defence, calling it unreasonable. Trump insists on that figure, but doesn't say it should apply to America. The alliance operates on a consensus that requires the backing of all 32 members. Trump has since lashed out at Prime Minister Pedro Snchez's government, saying: NATO is going to have to deal with Spain. Spain's been a very low payer." He also criticised Canada as a low payer. European allies and Canada a