NATO says 18 members will reach 2% spending target this year 

Eighteen out of 31 NATO countries will spend more than the required 2% of GDP on defence in 2024, according to estimates presented by Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday (14 February), days after US presidential candidate Donald Trump criticised the alliance for under-investing.

“This year, I expect 18 allies to spend 2% of their GDP on defence,” accounting for more than half of the members, Jens Stoltenberg told reporters ahead of this week’s meeting of Ukraine’s military allies and a separate NATO defence ministerial preparing the alliance’s July summit in Washington. He did not specify which countries.

In 2024, Europe and Canada alone will invest “$380 billion in defence, which amounts to 2% of their combined GDP”, he said, highlighting that it was a “six-fold increase from 2014”.

The announcement comes just days after Trump spooked the Western alliance’s members by suggesting that Washington would not protect NATO allies who fail to meet the target of spending at least 2% of their GDP on defence for the sake of collective security and burden sharing.

While almost all NATO members pledged to ramp up their defence spending following Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022, only seven out of 30 allies met the target that year.

But 2023 showed an “unprecedented rise of 11% [in defence spending],” Stoltenberg said.

This surge in spending shows that “European allies are spending more,” and “we are making real progress”, the NATO chief said.

Three NATO diplomats talking to Euractiv said the alliance’s members had to show Trump they were now investing more and promise publicly to continue to do so to gain his trust ahead of the US presidential election in November.

In an attempt to show their commitment to seriously increasing defence spending, NATO countries agreed at a summit in Vilnius last July to treat the 2% of GDP spending target as a minimum rather than a ceiling as it had been the case before.

After years of under-investment following the Cold War, defence spending first started increasing in 2014 with the war in Eastern Ukraine, picked up pace as then-US president Trump warned Western allies that the US might abandon its NATO treaty commitments, and then rose again when Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago.

Trump’s remarks at the time also prompted French President Emmanuel Macron’s calls for building a more autonomous Europe instead of relying heavily on the US for security.

Stoltenberg encouraged all allies to keep investing and making good on the decision to invest at least 2%. “However, some allies still have some way to go,” he told reporters.

“We agreed at the summit that all allies should invest 2% and it is a minimum,” he said as a reminder.

At last year’s summit in Vilnius, leaders decided to “strengthen defence and deterrence, and now putting these plans into action requires investing more,” Stoltenberg also said.

[Edited by Alexandra Brzozowski/Zoran Radosavljevic]

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