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.