NATO allies have started cobbling together an agreement to significantly boost defence spending in a way that may assuage U.S. President Donald Trump’s demand to spend five per cent of economic output on the military.
Negotiators in the military alliance are making progress on a path to achieve five per cent of gross domestic product on defence and defence-related spending by 2032 ahead of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in The Hague in June, according to diplomats familiar with the matter. NATO foreign ministers will discuss the initiative at a meeting in the Turkish resort city of Antalya Wednesday and Thursday.
The Mediterranean meeting takes place against a rush of diplomacy as the Trump administration pushes to end Russia’s war in Ukraine that’s dragged on for more than three years. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he’s prepared to meet face-to-face with Vladimir Putin in Istanbul Thursday as the warring sides grapple with demands for a ceasefire. The Russian leader has given no sign he’ll come.
Agreement on defence spending on the scale that Trump demands — none of NATO’s 32 members, including the U.S., has achieved that threshold — would mark the biggest increase by Western allies since the end of the Cold War as NATO members retrench since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Since his first term, Trump has hectored allies for failing to meet a long-standing two per cent threshold for spending. Eight of 32 allies hadn’t reached two per cent spending as of NATO’s annual report in April.
Secretary General Mark Rutte is pushing allies to agree to a level of 3.5 per cent of GDP in the next seven years, topped by an extra 1.5 per cent earmarked for a wider set of spending related to defence. Rutte laid out his expectations in a letter sent to NATO partners in early May, Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof told reporters last week.
Extra-spending component
Rutte, speaking to reporters in the U.S. last month, said the goal for The Hague summit — Trump’s first since returning to the White House — would be to equalize spending within the alliance considering the outsize U.S. proportion compared with European NATO allies and Canada.
The U.S. currently accounts for 64 per cent of the alliance’s defence expenditure, with Canada and Europe bringing 36 per cent, according to the estimates for 2024 put forward in the last NATO report.
Ministers in Antalya will discuss what kind of spending would count toward the 1.5 per cent component, including areas such as military mobility, dual-use goods and cybersecurity, the diplomats said, adding that talks are in an initial stage. It remained unclear whether that segment would include existing spending or require fresh commitments. Even aid for Ukraine may fall in that category, according to a senior Turkish official.
Rutte’s proposal includes a regular and rigorous verification mechanism, unlike the looser goals set currently by allies.
Boosting spending by an order of magnitude in the time-frame being discussed will be an enormous challenge, one senior European diplomat said, though many now view the effort as necessary to send a strong message to the Kremlin.
Some NATO members, including Italy and Spain, have only recently announced reaching the two per cent level. All are expected to meet the old benchmark by the summit, according to a person familiar with the issue.
Hague summit
The core 3.5 per cent target is based on ambitious new defence plans being drawn up by NATO. The alliance has distributed detailed, highly classified lists of weapons and other capabilities to member governments, which defense chiefs will discuss in Brussels on Wednesday.
The lists, known as capability targets, have been broadly accepted by allies and are likely to be signed onto at a meeting of defense ministers in Brussels in early June, according to people familiar with the discussions. That will leave formal adoption at the June 24-25 summit in The Hague.
The summit is expected to be shorter than previous gatherings and focus on spending and an industrial ramp-up, culminating in a short declaration, according to European diplomats. One diplomat said the subject will be the alliance — and not Ukraine’s future within it.
Trump’s skepticism of Ukraine’s NATO membership has taken the option off the table for now — and an extension of NATO’s US$40 billion pledge to support the war-battered nation drawn up last year has also not been discussed.
Another Rutte initiative on the table involves overhauling the alliance’s efficiency and internal governance, people familiar with the discussions said. The shakeup effort could appeal to the U.S. president, one person said.
With assistance from Natalia Drozdiak and Patrick Van Oosterom.
Andrea Palasciano and Selcan Hacaoglu, Bloomberg News
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