Nato chief to call on UK to spend 3.5% of GDP on defence
Life comes at you fast in Downing Street.
It's only a week since the Prime Minister was dodging questions about when he would increase defence spending to 3% of GDP.
Today the Nato Secretary General is in town to tell Keir Starmer that actually Britain ought to spend 3.5% by 2035.
Its expected the PM will agree with the target. And we are talking big sums here. That extra 0.5% is worth north of £17bn.
Put a different way our defence budget of around £60bn would have to rise to more like £100bn to meet the 3.5% which is the new Nato target.
Thats an NHS scale amount of money. And it inevitably means spending cuts elsewhere or tax rises or both.
There are two reasons for this.
The first is Vladimir Putin, the second is Donald Trump.
Putin has shown he is ready and willing to attack his European neighbours. Trump has suggested he is less willing to come to the rescue.
Today it is Ukraine, tomorrow it could be Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania. That's where we come in. Those three Baltic states are all Nato members.
If they are attacked we would be obliged to defend them, we would be at war with Russia; that's the Nato deal.
Mark Rutte wants Nato to be big enough, tough enough and determined enough to deter Putin, to make it not worth his while to test the alliance.
But Nato's 2035 target is, of course, ten years away.
Many defence analysts think that it will only take Putin a couple of years after ending the Ukraine war to reconstitute his armed forces.
So here's the key question; are we in a Cold War moment when the threat in Europe will not materialise, or a pre-1939 moment when it will?
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The Independent
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- The Independent
‘Hope is not a strategy': Why Nato is calling for Cold War levels of defence spending
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Sometimes, as in Vietnam and Korea, the west sent its forces into war – but overwhelmingly the suffering for the ideological schism that split the world was in what was then known as the Third World. In South America, CIA-baked coups removed leaders who were deemed too 'commie-inclined' by Washington where republicans and democrats were terrified of reds getting under beds in their back yards. Kennedy's clash with Khrushchev came close to WW3 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But it was the ability of the West to outspend the Soviet Union that brought the Iron Curtain down on the Soviet Empire. The Soviets spent between 10 and 20 per cent of GDP on the military while Nato was spending half that. Moscow depended on high oil process for its economic wellbeing while its collectivisation of farming and industrial policies stifled innovation. When oil crashed from $120/barrel to the mid $20s/barrel in the 1980s, the social and political necessity for reform became overwhelming. 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Cuts in military spending after the Cold War ended were based on the assumption that a western-style way of life would be adopted in Russia. But the country largely fell into gangsterism and is seen by many there to have been rescued by Putin's more organized oligarchic kleptocracy underpinned by vigorous Soviet-style fear and denunciation of 'The West'. It may be a Moscow myth that Nato covets the Russian Federation but it is one that is believed widely in Putin's realm. That the West is somehow always going to be safe for democracy is an equally dangerous delusion, Rutte suggested. 'Wishful thinking will not keep us safe. We cannot dream away the danger… Hope is not a strategy. So Nato has to become a stronger, fairer and more lethal alliance.' In the UK, Sir Keir Starmer has committed to spend 2.5 per cent of gross domestic product on defence from April 2027, with a goal of increasing that to 3 per cent over the next parliament, a timetable which could stretch to 2034. 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