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		</div><p>Angela Merkel has underlined Germany&#8217;s rejection of a claim by US president Donald Trump that her country owes Nato large sums for underspending on defence.</p>
<p>The German chancellor also pointed to decades of post-Second World War military restraint by her country.<br />
Mr Trump tweeted on Saturday, just one day after meeting Mrs Merkel in Washington, that &#8220;Germany owes vast sums of money to NATO&#8221;.</p>
<p>He added: &#8220;The United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defence it provides to Germany!&#8221; Berlin&#8217;s defence budget has long been below Nato&#8217;s target of 2% of a member&#8217;s gross domestic product.</p>
<p>The figure is currently at 1.23%, though Germany has been raising defence spending and Mrs Merkel has stressed its commitment to reaching the target by 2024.</p>
<p>Mrs Merkel said defence spending is &#8220;not just about contributions to Nato, but also about European contributions in Africa for example, UN missions&#8221;.</p>
<p>She said at a news conference in Hannover with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe: &#8220;Not a single Nato member state pays its entire defence budget into Nato.&#8221;</p>
<p>Mrs Merkel said that defence spending &#8220;can&#8217;t be uncoupled from historical developments from one day to the next&#8221;. She recalled that the immediate post-Second World War aim was to have a Germany that was integrated into the international community.</p>
<p>Germany gradually emerged from its post-war diplomatic and military shell after reunification in 1990, sending troops to Kosovo and Afghanistan &#8211; though it also refused to join the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.</p>
<p>Military missions are not popular with the public and are often a subject of agonised political debate.<br />
&#8220;Of course the role of Germany has changed,&#8221; Mrs Merkel said.</p>
<p>&#8220;If you look at our military commitment today, then you see that a quarter-century later Germany plays a completely different role.</p>
<p>&#8220;But it is a process, and it is a process that the United States of America wanted &#8230; And we cannot simply cast off this process from one day to the next.&#8221; She said defence spending is only one contribution to security, along with development aid and political solutions to conflicts.</p>
<p>Mrs Merkel&#8217;s centre-left rivals in a September election, and current coalition partners, have struck a sharper tone on the Trump administration&#8217;s reinforcement of demands that Nato allies should pay more.</p>
<p>Spending 2% of GDP on defence would mean doubling Germany&#8217;s defence budget, and &#8220;I don&#8217;t know who can imagine that something like that is possible,&#8221; foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel told a congress of his Social Democrats on Sunday.</p>
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