US President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday NATO members should be spending 5% of GDP on defense, up from the current 2% minimum.

"They can all afford it, but they should be at 5% not 2%," Trump told reporters.

"Europe is in for a tiny fraction of the money that we're in," Trump continued. "We have a thing called the ocean in between us, right? Why are we in for billions and billions of dollars more money than Europe?"

At the Vilnius Summit in 2023, NATO leaders agreed upon a Defense Investment Pledge, making a commitment to invest at least 2% of GDP annually on defense.

NATO chief Mark Rutte, who took office as the military alliance's 14th Secretary General on October 1 last year, is also keen for an increase in defense spending as "we are going to need a lot more than 2%," the former Dutch prime minister said last month.

Rutte also said that European nations were not prepared for the threat of future conflict with Russia, calling on NATO members to "turbocharge" defense spending.

Trump, who was an outspoken critic of NATO during his first term in office, is set to return to the White House for a second stint after his inauguration on January 20.

Scholz criticizes Green Party proposal for defense spending hike

Before Trump made his remarks, the notion of an increase in NATO members' defense spending was dismissed by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Scholz belongs to the center-left Social Democratic Party.

Scholz responded to a proposal made by Robert Habeck, who will lead the Greens into German federal elections on February 23, when he said the proposal to increase defense spending was a "half-baked" idea.

"Who will pay the bill? The citizens?" Scholz told The Stern Weekly, a current affairs magazine published in Hamburg.

jsi/wd (dpa, AFP)