As Trump demands more military spending, NATO reconsiders what counts

Boston Globe

23-05-2025

The latter could include building or improving rail lines and bridges to withstand the weight of military convoys, strengthening cybersecurity, or developing advanced technology for weaponry and communications. Some member nations are open to shouldering more of their collective costs, alarmed by Trump's threats to weaken America's support for European security if they don't.
'We have to make sure that we have all the enablers in place, everything related to defense spending in place,' NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said last week after meeting with the alliance's foreign ministers in Turkey, where countries agreed to the 5 percent plan.
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'Sometimes when you cross a bridge in Europe, you hope with your own car that you safely get across it — let alone with a tank,' he added.
Rutte came up with the approach to meeting the spending goal, according to a NATO country's foreign minister and a European diplomat. It combines what many experts think: European countries must spend on hard military power to take responsibility for conventional deterrence while meeting Trump's demand.
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Germany's newly appointed foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, said in Turkey that his government backs Rutte's proposal. His French counterpart, Jean-Noël Barrot, said that a '3 to 3.5 percent target is right,' but hinted at backing the broader plan in remarks to reporters.
The new approach reflects allied governments' efforts to win over Trump, or at least show him they are making progress on his appeals.
It is also an acknowledgment that NATO members' current pledge, to spend 2 percent of its GDP on the military, is too little to sustain the alliance against the backdrop of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the first full-scale land war in Europe since World War II. Some member states have yet to meet even that commitment.
In the latest official figures, 23 of NATO's 32 member states meet or surpass the current 2 percent threshold. The Trump administration appears to be open to allies broadening how they invest in defense spending, so long as the total reaches 5 percent.
'It is definitely more than just missiles, tanks and howitzers,' Matthew G. Whitaker, the new US ambassador to NATO, said last week. 'But at the same time, it's got to be defense-related. It's not a grab-bag for everything.'
At the Lennart Meri security conference in Estonia last weekend, Whitaker said that the United States would also commit to the same spending goal of 5 percent, though that amount is much larger than for other NATO countries. The United States spends nearly $1 trillion on global military operations.
Increasing the overall spending threshold to 5 percent would bring NATO's collective defense spending to $2.4 trillion, with the United States still paying more than half, according to a recent estimate by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
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In Europe, where 23 states are members of both NATO and the European Union, leaders have considerably bolstered defense and deterrence since Russia invaded Ukraine. But the new spending commitment would require significant investment from laggards like Italy, Portugal, and Spain, and put more pressure on key countries with already high budget deficits, like France and Britain.
Some states, like Baltic nations that border Russia, have already planned to spend at least 5 percent of their gross national product on traditional military costs like personnel, weapons, and military operations, including exercises, by the end of the decade. Estonia plans on surpassing that goal in 2026. Poland also aims to reach the goal by next year.
'The target of NATO member countries must be 5 percent in the future,' Estonia's foreign minister, Margus Tsahkna, said at the meeting last week. 'And we are not talking about anything other than real defense spending, which is stipulated in NATO regulations.'
Without allowing spending on infrastructure and technology, however, it is unlikely that most allies could meet the mark.
The Italian government, for example, projects it will reach 2 percent of GDP on defense spending this year, an increase. But Italy does not yet count certain technologies that could be put to military use strictly as defense spending, said Roberto Cingolani, the CEO of the Italian defense firm Leonardo.
If they were, he predicted the percentage of Italy's defense expenditures could quickly rise.
Advanced technology, like artificial intelligence and cloud computing, is 'becoming the new backbone of defense,' Cingolani said in a recent interview. 'It's not just bullets; it's bullets and bytes.'
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Experts said Trump's demands also created an incentive for Europe to finally break through funding and bureaucratic hurdles to address another vulnerability: upgrading key transit routes for any rapid deployment of troops and weapons.
The war in Ukraine has highlighted Europe's shortcomings in such logistical preparedness. Tanks and other heavy military equipment have been stopped from crossing borders in Europe where roads and bridges were too weak to support their weight, a study this year by EU auditors found.
Military cargo arriving by train from Western Europe to the Baltics, where Soviet-standard-size rails are still used in some places, must be transferred from one train to another to be delivered to NATO's eastern flank, said Jannik Hartmann of the German Council on Foreign Relations. And many other rail lines among Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland — a key NATO support corridor — are either closed or congested.
In case of war, countries need to 'have sufficient alternative routes that we can take if one falls through,' Hartmann said, pointing to a rail bridge in Hannover-Ahlem in Germany, a crossroads for European transit that has been used as a route for shipping military equipment to Ukraine.
It is under construction, rerouting trains on long detours that, he said, 'costs not only money, but puts lives on the front line at risk.'
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