This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. This is Gavin Newsom. And this is Richard Haas.

Richard, thank you so much for taking the time to come on, particularly at a remarkable time

in world history, particularly in history unfolding in the Middle East. Today, President Trump

seemed to have a day that he's been looking forward to for years and years and years, pushing NATO

to move from 2 percent to 5 percent. What was your takeaway from this NATO summit, at least

the first day? And does Trump deserve, I think,

a lot of praise for an accomplishment here? I would argue President Trump, well, first of all,

Gavin, good to be with you. Thank you. Look, I would argue President Trump deserves credit

for spurring the Europeans to do what they ought to have done years before. They ought to be putting forward a larger share of the effort for what's a common defense.

I would just as an aside, I would say much more important to me than whether the Europeans spend 3% or 2.5 or 4.5

is how they spend it. And I'd actually say something you'd probably agree with in public

policy, how you spend money. It's almost always more important than how much you spend.

And the problem with European defense is not just that they spend too little, but each country

pretty much determines how it spends its

defense euros. So the whole ends up being less than the sum of its parts. So I would be pushing,

if I were advising the president, I would say, yeah, push them to do more. But secondly,

also push them in a sense to become more European rather than country by country by country, which is the way

they often go about it. But I think that part is good. The less good is I think he's introduced

some doubts into the reliability of the United States and what you might call the automatic quality

of Article 5, America's willingness to go to bat for Europe.

And obviously, there's also some fairly significant differences about how to handle the most

immediate threat, which is Russia and the war in Ukraine. So I think it's a mixed bag.

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