LONDON (Reuters) – NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte will insist at this week’s alliance summit that member states are keeping their promise to boost defence spending. Yet progress has been uneven and the push is already stretching some national budgets.
Under pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump, members of the 32-country military pact agreed at last year’s summit to boost defence 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.
NATO says its European members plus Canada spent an extra $90 billion on defence 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.
Before the summit, Rutte has stressed that last year’s new spend amounts to a bigger $139 billion tally in nominal terms and that there is a “strong commitment” to hit the combined 5% target on time.
Germany will use a rule change exempting defence items from strict borrowing limits to double its spending to over €200 billion ($228.38 billion) between now and 2030, according to a budget draftseen by Reuters ahead of a cabinet review on Monday.
Poland, Lithuania and Estonia – countries where the perception of the threat posed by Russia is at its sharpest – are already well on their way to making the new targets, with Warsaw notably having devoted 4.3% of GDP to defence last year.
Elsewhere the push faces political and fiscal roadblocks.
Britain last week announced plans for an extra £15 billion ($20.01 billion) of defence 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.
More fundamentally, the plan was criticised by opposition politicians and former military chiefs for failing to set out when defence spending would reach 3% of GDP, on the way to meeting Britain’s NATO commitment to spend 3.5% of GDP by 2035.
