President-elect said European NATO members are much more affected by Ukraine conflict than the US but still spend less on defense
NATO countries should start spending 5% of their GDP on defense, US President-elect Donald Trump said on Tuesday. European members of the US-led military bloc, he told a press conference, continue to spend “only a tiny fraction” of what Washington spends on defense, even though they are more affected by the ongoing conflict between Moscow and Kiev.
“It should be 5%, not 2%,” Trump told journalists at his Florida estate, referring to the spending threshold set by the bloc for its members. Some countries in the organization “have taken advantage of us,” the US president-elect said, repeating the statements he made during his first presidential term, when he pushed fellow NATO states to spend more on defense, arguing that the US would not protect them in case of a foreign aggression otherwise.
On Tuesday, Trump also spoke about a disparity in defense spending between various member countries. According to him, Washington was spending “billions and billions of dollars more … than Europe.” The president-elect then argued that the economy of the European NATO members combined is of a “similar size” to that of the US, adding that “they can all afford” an increase in defense spending.
The US-led bloc simply “can’t do it at [a 2% threshold],” the president-elect said, without going into details about his reasoning behind that statement. He even warned that European NATO member states are currently “in a dangerous territory” and also claimed his previous insistence on fellow members’ defense-spend increases “saved” the bloc.
According to a NATO report into defense spending published last June, none of the bloc’s members, including the US itself, currently spends 5% of their GDP on defense. Poland was the NATO member with the largest relative level of defense spending, having allocated over 4% of its GDP to this concern.
The US occupied third place in relative terms, behind Poland and Estonia, with just under 3.5% of its GDP spent on defense. As many as 15 members of the bloc, including Canada, Italy and France, continued to fall behind the organization’s 2% spending threshold as of June 2024, according to its own data.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has also spoken about bloc members’ need to increase this allocation in their budgets. “It is true that we spend more on defense now than we did a decade ago,” he said last month in Brussels, adding that the bloc nonetheless spends less on defense then during the Cold War, when “Europeans spent far more than 3% of their GDP” on it.
Asked about what new threshold he would consider sufficient, Rutte said “you have to go to at least 4%,” adding that “even with 4% you can’t defend yourselves, because then you would not have the latest technologies implemented… in your armies.”
Trump’s latest reiterations come as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz sharply criticized a proposal by his Economy Minister Robert Habeck to drastically increase the nation’s defense budget. According to Scholz, the proposed increase would only end up as additional burden for the German taxpayers.
