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President-elect Trump

BRUSSELS. — Top European officials hit back at US President-elect Donald Trump yesterday after he branded the NATO alliance “obsolete” and lashed out at a key nuclear deal with Iran.

In a hard-hitting interview with two major European newspapers, Trump unleashed a volley of verbal attacks on Europe, dubbing German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy “catastrophic” and hailing Britain’s decision to leave the EU.

Meanwhile, the Russian government agrees with Trump that NATO is obsolete, the Kremlin said yesterday.

“NATO is truly a relic of the past. We agree with this and we have long been expressing our views on the organisation,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying by TASS news agency. As NATO is tuned to confrontation and its entire structure is dedicated to the ideals of confrontation, of course, it can hardly be called a modern structure that meets the ideas of stability, sustainable development and security,” Peskov added. He was commenting on a recent Trump interview with The Times newspaper of Britain and Bild of Germany, in which he said NATO was “obsolete because it was not taking care of terror,” and he complained that various members of the bloc were not paying their dues, which was “very unfair to the United States.”

But the EU’s foreign policy supremo led the European response, insisting the bloc would stand by the nuclear accord, described by Trump as “one of the dumbest deals I have ever seen”.

Speaking ahead of a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels, Federica Mogherini said the deal was “proof that diplomacy works and delivers”.

“The European Union will continue to work for the respect and implementation of this extremely important deal, most of all for our security,” she said.

Britain’s foreign minister Boris Johnson also defended the deal, saying it had “great merit” and “we want to keep it going”. Germany’s top diplomat Frank-Walter Steinmeier acknowledged NATO “concern” over Trump’s remarks about the US-led alliance.

“This is in contradiction with what the American defence minister said in his hearing in Washington only some days ago and we have to see what will be the consequences for American policy,” Steinmeier told reporters.

In comments set to cause further consternation among eastern European NATO countries nervous about Moscow following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and involvement in Ukraine, Trump slammed NATO as “obsolete”.

“I said a long time ago that NATO had problems,” Trump told The Times of London and Bild, Germany’s biggest-selling daily, just days ahead of his inauguration Friday. — AFP.