NATO leaders on Wednesday agreed to a major defense spending increase while leaving room for some alliance countries, including Spain, Belgium and Slovakia, to not hit the new spending goals thanks to very particular wording.
“Allies commit to invest 5% of GDP annually on core defense requirements as well as defense-and security-related spending by 2035 to ensure our individual and collective obligations,” the 32 leaders of the alliance said in a statement that pointedly did not specify “all allies” had committed to doing so.
President Trump since his first term has pressured NATO countries to commit more of their annual GDP to military spending as the United States looks to shift its attention from security priorities in Europe to the Indo-Pacific and Middle East.
NATO’s biggest-spending member, Washington since early this year has insisted alliance countries must up their defense dollars from the 2 percent goal set in 2014 to the ambitious 5 percent. But the goal seemed to be a stretch given that nine of the 32 NATO member countries have yet to reach the earlier 2 percent goal.
With vague diplomatic language, however, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has claimed he delivered on Trump’s spending demands.
“For too long, one ally, the United States, carried too much of the burden of that commitment. And that changes today,” Rutte said at the end of a meeting of NATO leaders Wednesday.
“President Trump, dear Donald, you made this change possible. Your leadership on this has already produced $1 trillion in extra spending from European allies since 2016. And the decisions today will produce trillions more for our common defense to make us stronger and fairer by equalizing spending between America and America’s allies,” Rutte added.
To hit the 5 percent goal – which countries have until 2035 to reach – allies agreed to split the spending among different buckets to easier reach targets. Now, 3.5 percent of the GDP dollars will go to “core defense spending,” such as weapons and military equipment, while 1.5 percent will fund defense-adjacent spending – including improving a country’s road or port infrastructure to better deploy forces or investing in cyber defense.
A review of spending is set for 2029 to monitor progress and reassess Russia’s security threat, given its ongoing war in Ukraine and overt threats to alliance members should they interfere in the conflict.
But several countries have made clear they will not be meeting the new targets as they are pressed by economic challenges – issues that could be made worse by Trump’s global tariffs. Among the most vocal of those countries is Spain, which before the NATO summit officially announced that it cannot meet the “unreasonable” goal by 2035.
“Not all allies are bound to the 5 percent target,” according to a statement from the Spanish government ahead of the summit.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez put it more bluntly when he said “we’re not going to do it,” saying instead that Madrid would spend 2.1 percent of its GDP – meeting NATO’s new capability targets – but “no more, no less.”
According to alliance figures from June 2024, Spain now spends just under 1.3 percent of its GDP on defense.
Spain’s stance has drawn the ire of Trump, who on Wednesday falsely claimed it was “the only country that won’t pay the full up,” and threatened it with harsh trade deals to make up the difference.
“I think Spain’s terrible what they’ve done. They want to stay at 2 percent, I think it’s terrible,” Trump said during a press conference at the conclusion of the summit. “They’re doing very well. The economy is very well. And that economy could be blown right out of the water with something bad happening.”
He later added that he would negotiate directly with Spain on a trade deal, saying: “We’re going to make them pay twice as much. And I’m actually serious about that. . . . They want a little bit of a free ride, but they’ll have to pay it back to us on trade, because I’m not going to let that happen. It’s unfair. . . . They’ll pay more money this way.”
But other countries have also signaled they will not reach the 5 percent goal, including Slovakia, which said it has the right to set its own defense spending.
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico on Monday said his country “has other priorities in the coming years than armament,” and “is capable of meeting NATO’s requirements even without a substantial increase in defense spending,” according to a post to X.
Belgium also has followed suit, with its prime minister, Bart De Wever, saying Wednesday that “if the interpretation of Spain is correct, anybody can interpret the text in the same way,” and that his country is “almost in the same situation” as Spain.
Weaver did allow that Belgium is “planning to do more” than the current 1.3 percent of its GDP spent on defense.
In addition, Luxembourg Prime Minister Luc Frieden did not fully commit to the aim of 5 percent, saying his country’s goal “is to continue to increase our collective effort in the years to come.”