Officially, NATO doesn’t want to set new goals on what countries should spend on their own defenses until next year.
Unofficially, no one could stop talking about it at the NATO Summit.
The original goal of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, first announced in 2014, is a highly volatile issue for the alliance — partly because one-third of the member nations are under pressure for failing to reach the target this year; and because Donald Trump hammered European allies that fell short when he was president.
And while a consensus is growing among NATO leaders that the spending target should now be higher than 2 percent, they can’t seem to agree on what the number should be.
The sensitivity over the issue — and the specter of Trump’s return — permeated discussions among current and former NATO officials throughout the summit this week in Washington.
“If Trump comes back to power,” said Fabrice Pothier, who served as former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s policy chief, “the laggards will have to really be creative and raise their spending plans.”
The question now becomes: If 2 percent isn’t enough, what should the new goal be?
The countries on Russia’s doorstep believe the number should be much higher.
Polish President Andrzej Duda has called on NATO to raise the target to 3 percent. Lithuanian Defense Minister Laurynas Kasčiūnas called 2.5 percent “a good thing to talk about as a minimum floor.”
Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur agreed that the alliance needs to significantly increase its targets.
“Two percent is not enough,” Pevkur said during a POLITICO roundtable on Tuesday. “We have to go to 2.5, maybe even 3 percent.”
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said during the NATO Public Forum that the alliance will need to increase spending if it wants to effectively counter Russia and maintain the necessary support for Ukraine.
“I think the 2 percent maybe can cover the traditional security questions,” Frederiksen said. “But if we are going to include technology, and we have to do that … we have to, I think, invest much more and we have to build much stronger partnerships outside NATO.”
Others say that number doesn’t come close.
Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said at the NATO Public Forum that the U.S. should aim to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense, while underscoring the need for greater burden sharing among the alliance.
“China is increasing their defense spending dramatically,” Wicker said. “We are being overtaken by the dictatorships of this world. They don’t have to spend money on school lunches, on social spending, on retirement programs.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday acknowledged the growing calls to go beyond 2 percent, although he stopped short of endorsing a specific new goal and spoke in general terms about seeing an energized alliance.
“I see NATO speaking not only with unity, but unity that’s actually raising the floor, raising the floor on what NATO partners are contributing, raising the floor on an understanding of the threats that we face, raising the floor on our commitment to take action together to deal with those threats,” Blinken said during the Public Forum. “So, far from a race to the bottom just for the sake of consensus or unity, what I’m seeing is a race to the top by this alliance.”
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis also suggested that the alliance will need to raise its national defense spending target to at least 2.5 percent.
“At some point, we’ll need to talk about raising [the target] if we want to do everything that we want to do,” he said during an on-stage interview at the NATO Public Forum.
France is also open to having a conversation about increasing spending targets, although Elysée officials didn’t want to talk about numbers.
“The priority is to get everyone to spend 2 percent of GDP,” an Elysée official, speaking on condition of anonymity to speak more freely, told reporters last week. “The question [of a higher target] is legitimate and will arise differently depending on the allies’ size and economic situation.”
Despite the growing support for more spending, the alliance will face challenges as it attempts to negotiate a higher spending target over the next year.
Pothier said he would be surprised if the alliance raised the target to 3 percent, calling 2.5 percent a more reasonable goal.
One issue is that defense contractors are struggling to meet existing orders, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas conceded.
“One prime minister asked me that: ‘Where can I spend? I want to spend 2 percent, but nobody’s selling [to] me now because they don’t have anything,’” Kallas said.
Another is that the discussions around raising the target at next year’s summit will be complicated by the start of negotiations around the EU’s next seven-year budget.
“There’s going to be a lot of blood on the carpet. There’s going to be big disagreements between France and Germany,” Pothier said. “Allies don’t look at the NATO defense spending isolated. They look at it with all the other obligations they have.”
Italy is among the countries that are on track to spend less than 2 percent of GDP on defense this year.Luxembourg said it would reach the target by 2030 and Belgium has pledged to reach the mark by 2035.
Though Ottawa entered the Washington summit as one of the few laggards without a concrete plan to reach the defense spending target, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on the final day of the summit that Canada will reach the goal in less than a decade.
“We can say with confidence and assurance that we will hit the 2 percent spending mark by 2032,” Trudeau said at a press conference on Thursday.
“We have stepped up massively after years of underinvestment by the previous Conservative government,” Trudeau added. “We have stepped up in investing in planning for the future in a deeply changing world.”
The announcement came days after Trudeau’s defense minister, Bill Blair, acknowledged that Ottawa needed to spend more on defense.
“I’m in complete agreement with my allies that Canada must do more,” Blair said Monday at Foreign Policy’s Security Forum.
Eric Bazail-Eimil, Nahal Toosi, Lee Hudson and Connor O’Brien contributed to this report.