Can NATO Finally Make the 2 Percent Stick?

Excerpt

Eyeing the NATO summit in Vilnius next month, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg reiterated last Tuesday the need for each alliance member to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense, a long-standing NATO goal. Stoltenberg’s comments are laudable, but a NATO report released in March suggests that getting all alliance members to actually meet the 2 percent threshold may be easier said than done. Although the report highlights some progress since the goal was set at NATO’s 2014 summit in Wales, it documents many members’ continued failure to meet their defense-spending commitments.

On the good-news side of the ledger: Based on budget estimates for 2022, the United States’ NATO allies—28 European countries plus Canada—collectively increased their defense spending for the eighth consecutive year. Since 2014, the report states, these countries have added $350 billion to their defense spending. From 2021 to 2022 alone, European allies and Canada together increased their defense spending by an estimated 2.2 percent in real, inflation-adjusted terms.

Bradley Bowman is the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former advisor to members of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. Twitter: @Brad_L_Bowman. Jack Sullivan is a research associate at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.