Security personnel walk inside the presidential compound a day before the start of the NATO summit, in Ankara, Turkey, Monday. [Stoyan Nenov/Reuters]
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte will insist at this week’s alliance summit that member states are keeping their promise to boost defense spending. Yet progress has been uneven and the push is already stretching some national budgets.
Under pressure from US President Donald Trump, members of the 32-country military pact agreed at last year’s summit to boost defense spending to 5% of GDP by 2035 – just over double the overall level for European states and Canada in 2025.
But since then, two camps have emerged: one is led by Germany and the mostly Nordic and eastern European nations which have found the fiscal space to raise spending; in the other are several big players struggling to do the same.
“The UK isn’t managing, for example. France isn’t and Italy isn’t either,” Guntram Wolff, senior fellow at the Bruegel economics think tank, said of the three largest economies in Europe behind Germany.
