NATO is working on plan to raise defense spending to 5 percent, as Trump wants it
Negotiators in the military alliance make progress on their way to 5% of gross domestic product for defense and defense -related expenditure from 2032, according to diplomats who are familiar with the case. The Foreign Ministers of NATO will discuss the initiative on Wednesday and Thursday during a meeting in the Turkish resort of Antalya.
Read too. US put their allies on their throat, but NATO boss Rutte does not see the problem
Agreement on defense issues on the scale that Trump demands – none of the 32 NATO members, including the US, achieved that threshold – would mean the greatest increase by Western allies since the end of the Cold War. But we are not that far yet.
Since his first term of office, Trump has invited the allies because they did not achieve the long -standing threshold of 2% for expenditure.
Secretary-General Mark Rutte is now urging the allies to agree to a level of 3.5% of GDP in the next seven years, supplemented with an additional 1.5% for a wider package of defense-related expenses.
The US is currently responsible for 64% of the alliance expenditure of the alliance, Canada and Europe 36%, according to the estimates for 2024 in the last NATO report.
With those allies, a few white will be around the nose when they all hear that. Not in the least in Belgian Wetstraat. Two percent defense spending, that had just become the minimum, and everyone knows that more will be asked at the NATO summit in The Hague at the end of June.
But for a small country like Belgium, with a high GDP, what is on the table is simply unfeasible. It would mean that the defense budget must be increased from around 12 billion to around 30 billion euros. That is, the standard, almost as much as the social security operating budget.
The United States are prepared ‘to only flexibility’ and to broadly interpret the term defense spending. It should not all be tanks, attack drones and houwiesters, investing in infrastructure and cyber security is also possible. But there is no discussion about the norm: it must go to 5 percent as far as they are concerned. Without exceptions.
