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During the G-7 summit, Biden will take part in bilateral meetings with other leaders, including with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the statement said. The president will also hold bilateral meetings with NATO leaders at the trans-Atlantic alliance’s summit, Psaki said.
At the NATO Summit, Biden will “affirm the United States’ commitment to NATO,” the statement said, an apparent rebuke of former President Donald Trump’s approach to the alliance, which was at times rocky and focused in large part on what the former president characterized as the inadequate defense spending of other member nations.
That imbalance in defense spending also prompted Trump to decline to affirm U.S. commitment to NATO’s Article Five, the mutual-aid provision that obligates member states to view an attack on one member as an attack on all of them. Trump ultimately did commit the U.S. to its Article Five obligations but threatened a year later to pull the U.S. out of NATO if member states did not up their defense budgets.
Later in his presidency, Trump made a habit of claiming credit for NATO nations’ increased military spending. But Psaki said Friday that pushing member states to invest more in defense was a U.S. priority that predated Trump’s presidency.
“I know he thought he invented that, but having worked in the Obama administration, I can say the objective has always been encouraging members of NATO to pay more, pushing members of NATO to pay more,” Psaki said. “And that’s consistently been the U.S. policy for some time.”
Biden, at this year’s NATO summit, will also affirm America’s “commitment to…Transatlantic securit[y] and collective defense,” according to the statement from Psaki.
“NATO leaders will discuss how to orient the Alliance to future threats and ensure effective burden sharing,” the press secretary said in her statement.
Psaki said in the statement that the EU-U.S. summit in Brussels will “underscore our commitment to a strong Transatlantic partnership based on shared interests and values.”
During the summit, Biden and foreign leaders will discuss items on a “common agenda” such as the economy, climate change, trade and other “mutual foreign policy concerns,” among other things.
During the G-7 summit, Biden will “reinforce our commitment to multilateralism, work to advance key U.S. policy priorities on public health, economic recovery, and climate change, and demonstrate solidarity and shared values among major democracies,” the statement said.
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