Defense spending for NATO member states is sometimes a sensitive topic: even despite the agreement to allocate at least 2% of their GDP, not all Alliance countries have complied with this norm to date; regardless of that, Western media report that the newly elected U.S. President Donald Trump will demand from other NATO members a significant increase in defense spending, up to 5%.
However, the Financial Times notes with reference to its own sources, that, at first, a lower minimum will be required, around 3.5% of GDP, which sounds like a more realistic figure as of today. Sources also say the topic will be raised again at The Hague's NATO summit next year scheduled for June 2025.
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In general, this is not the first time that Trump has spoken about military spending in the context of NATO and has repeatedly threatened that the United States may withdraw from the Alliance should other countries ignore the demand to increase their defense commitments.
Amongst all this, the question arises as to how realistic it is to meet the requirement to set aside at least 3.5% of GDP for defense in a short-term perspective, given that not all members have yet surpassed the minimum threshold of 2%, according to the official NATO statistics as of June 2024. Here is the bird's eye view of the current situation:
By 2024, nations such as Spain, Slovakia, Luxembourg, Belgium, Canada, Italy, Portugal, and Croatia have not committed to allocating the target 2% which, for a reminder, was agreed on back in 2014. Moreover, most of them, except for Luxembourg, have made little progress in trying to reach the threshold over the past decade.
Next comes a list of countries that have exceeded the 2% mark, with more than half of them showing a remarkable increase in defense spending compared to the starting point ten years ago.
Among the top five relative to percentages of GDP are Baltic countries Estonia and Latvia (we should also credit Lithuania, the sixth from the top). As of 2024, these have shown significant growth and are currently at 3.43% and 3.15%, respectively. We should also single out Greece, which spent over 2% in 2014 already yet reached 3.08% by 2024.
Meanwhile, the United States itself, which is the initiator of the said increase in defense spending, is one of two states in this rating to demonstrate not a positive dynamic but a drop in expenditure relative to GDP percentage compared to 2014: from over 3.5% in 2012 down to 3.43% nowadays. Although we must remember that this indicator was on the rise during Trump's first presidency.
Perhaps the biggest leap and the top-1 figures are demonstrated by Poland, currently the closest to the 5% indicator, allocating 4.12% of GDP to defense today, with plans to break the historically record-high military budget with $42 billion or 4.7% of GDP committed for 2025.
Returning to Trump's stated requirement of 3.5%, still prone to debate, Defense Express can make a cautious assumption that only some of the Alliance countries will be able to reach the threshold in the short term; and if we talk 5%, even for those it would be extremely difficult. Such a drastic step would require both the political will of particularly reluctant countries and significant financial injections into defense budgets.
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