NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte will insist that member states are keeping their promise to boost defense spending at this week’s alliance summit. However, progress has been uneven, and the push is already stretching some national budgets.
Uneven Progress
Under pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump, members of the 32-country military pact agreed to boost defense spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. But since then, two camps have emerged: one led by Germany and the mostly Nordic and eastern European nations, which have found the fiscal space to raise spending, and another comprising several big players struggling to do the same.
According to Guntram Wolff, senior fellow at the Bruegel economics think tank, the UK, France, and Italy are not managing to increase their defense spending. NATO says its European members plus Canada spent an extra $90 billion on defense in real terms last year compared to 2024 as they seek to raise core military spending to 3.5% of GDP by 2035 with a further 1.5% GDP on security-related items.
Challenges Ahead
Germany will use a rule change exempting defense items from strict borrowing limits to double its spending to over €200 billion between now and 2030. Poland, Lithuania, and Estonia are already well on their way to making the new targets, with Warsaw notably having devoted 4.3% of GDP to defense last year.
However, the push faces political and fiscal roadblocks in other countries. Britain last week announced plans for an extra £15 billion of defense spending, partly funded by cuts elsewhere. But it emerged that one-third was still unfunded, creating an early budget challenge for the likely new prime minister Andy Burnham.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is due to tell the summit that Rome will lift core and non-core defense spending to 2.8% of GDP in 2026, roughly 0.71 percentage point higher than last year. But with higher military spending unpopular with many voters ahead of next year’s national elections, most of the increase will come from domestic security spending such as police duties.
Original reporting: Appleton, WI News Feed (HLL/CB) — read the source article.
