NATO lifts its game as Trump rattles the Trans-Atlantic alliance
New figures show 18 members will hit the 2 per cent spending pledge.
In the year that Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and likely approved the downing of MH17, just three NATO members — the US, the UK and Greece — were spending 2 per cent of their GDP on defence.
In the wake of Russia’s aggression, NATO member states meeting in Wales that year agreed that those falling short would ‘aim to move towards the 2% guideline within a decade’.
Ten years on, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg handed down his report card assessing that promise which has been since renewed following Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
‘Since the Investment Pledge was made in 2014, European Allies and Canada have added more than $600 billion for defence,’ Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels.
‘This year, I expect 18 allies to spend 2 per cent of their GDP on defence.
‘That is another record number and a six-fold increase from 2014.’
Stoltenberg added that for the first time, NATO’s European members would invest a total of $380 billion in defence, neatly amounting to 2 per cent of their GDP.
‘We are making real progress,’ Stoltenberg said.
‘European Allies are spending more. However, some Allies still have a way to go.’
Just who falls on the name-and-shame list will be clearer later this year when the Secretary-General releases his annual report.
But the timing of today’s announcement is acute. It follows Donald Trump’s weekend claim that he told an unnamed European president that he would not protect them from Russian invasion if they had not paid towards NATO.
Further, the Republican frontrunner said he would encourage Russia to do ‘whatever the hell they want’ against member states that did not pay.
NATO’s Article 5 states that all will come to the defence of any member who is attacked and it has only ever been invoked by the United States.
US President Joe Biden said Trump’s comments were ‘dumb, shameful, dangerous’ and ‘un-American.’
While seemingly encouraging a dictator to attack an ally was shocking, Trump’s anti-NATO rhetoric is hardly new. He threatened to withdraw the US from NATO during his presidency but did not go through with it.
Although that spooked Europe, it was ultimately Putin, with his illegal invasion of Ukraine that jolted governments into spending on defence at levels the US had long sought. Germany, for example, announced that it was one of the new entrants to NATO’s two per cent club.
But Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton warned that Trump should be taken seriously, recalling: ‘I was in the room when he damn near withdrew from NATO.’
Trump’s isolationism, rejection of US involvement in never-ending wars and preference for strongmen authoritarian leaders have come to define his MAGA movement and takeover of the Republican Party.
But he was not the only president to express US dissatisfaction with European leaders who were all too willing to let the United States underwrite continental security.
Oana Lungescu, a distinguished fellow with the London-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) had a front-row seat to these dynamics during her time as NATO spokeswoman between 2010 and 2013.
‘All US presidents, most recently Joe Biden and Donald Trump, have urged NATO European allies and Canada to invest more in their own defence,’ Lungescu told Latika Takes.
Lungescu said allies had made significant progress since then.
‘But clearly, they all need to invest much more and much faster, regardless of who sits in the White House, as both Russia and China are spending vast amounts on their militaries and closing ranks with other autocracies like North Korea and Iran.’
China remains one of the few bipartisan issues in Washington DC, from where Stoltenberg has just returned.
‘The more concerned they are about China, the size of China, the more important is to keep NATO strong because the United States represents 25 per cent of the world GDP,’ Stoltenberg stressed on Wednesday.
‘Together with NATO allies, we represent 50 per cent of the world economy and 50 per cent of the world's military might.’
He said that criticism in the US about NATO was not so much about the alliance but about allies not spending enough.
‘And that's a valid point … we haven't seen fair burden sharing in the alliance,’ he said.
But Stoltenberg’s messages on Wednesday were not just aimed across the Atlantic. In an interview with Reuters’ Andrew Gray, he also shut down any push for Europe to go it alone.
France’s Emmanuel Macron has long advocated ‘strategic autonomy’ for Europe, i.e. striking strategic decisions independent of the United States.
‘Any attempt to de-link Europe from North America will also divide Europe,’ Stoltenberg warned.