Not surprisingly, given what happened at the last two summits before this one, the 70th birthday gathering for North Atlantic Treaty Organization being held in London on Tuesday and Wednesday has once again been dominated by bickering over who pays what.

Although the 28 non-US parties have agreed to shoulder more of the funding for the trans-Atlantic security alliance's smaller in-house budget of about $2 billion, which mainly covers the daily operation of its headquarters in Brussels, that has been far from enough to appease the US leader, who is still calling for "fairer" sharing of the organization's military budget of about $1 trillion a year, of which the US says it pays about 70 percent.

The US leader is demanding all the other members increase their defense budgets to 2 percent of their gross domestic product as soon as possible, but so far only nine, mostly small countries, have done so.