With eye on Trump, NATO allies to boost defense spending

BRUSSELS — NATO allies of the United States plan to boost their defense spending by 4.3 percent this year, Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday, a response in part to intense pressure from President Donald Trump that the nations invest more in their militaries.

Trump has repeatedly castigated NATO allies for their dependence on the U.S. military for their defense and has at times called into question the basic U.S. security guarantees that have underpinned European stability since World War II.

The increase is “a clear demonstration that our alliance stands united in the face of any possible aggression,” Stoltenberg told reporters at the NATO headquarters, a day ahead of a meeting of NATO defense ministers. “We have really shifted gears. The trend is up, and we intend to keep it up.”

The increase — an estimate for 2017 — will boost military spending by NATO members, not including the United States, to $277 billion, which is still far less than the United States spends alone. Some of the spending increases were locked in before Trump’s election in November.

NATO on Wednesday released only a portion of its updated numbers, but its previous estimates for 2016 put the U.S. share of NATO defense spending at 70 percent.

The spending increases come after years of budget cuts up to 2014, as European nations trimmed spending on the belief that after the breakup of the Soviet Union, they need no longer be ready to fight a war on their own soil.

But after the Russian seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, NATO leaders pledged to increase annual defense spending to 2 percent of their gross domestic product by 2024. At a meeting in May, they said they would come up with concrete plans about how they would get there.

The spending increase announced Wednesday is $12 billion more than 2016 levels, and the increases are also growing bigger — 2016 spending was 3.3 percent higher than 2015 levels. Still, only five of NATO’s 29 members currently meet the spending guidelines. Romania plans to get there this year, while Lithuania and Latvia expect to meet the bar in 2018.

President Barack Obama also hit NATO allies for being overly reliant on the U.S. security umbrella, but Trump took the criticism to a new level on the campaign trail last year. Trump suggested that if a NATO member were attacked, he would first check their spending levels before deciding whether to come to their defense.

Then, at a meeting of NATO leaders last month that was designed for Trump to reassure his allies of U.S. defense commitments, he instead berated them for their spending and held back from an explicit commitment to NATO’s bedrock principle that an attack on one country is the same as an attack on them all, Article 5 in the alliance’s charter.

Trump later made that pledge alongside the Romanian president in the Rose Garden, but the damage was done.

Secretary of Defense James Mattis on Wednesday repeated the U.S. commitment, speaking alongside his German counterpart, Defense Minister Ursula Von der Leyen.

“The U.S. commitment to our NATO Article 5 security guarantee is ironclad, as demonstrated over decades of our steadfastness and given voice more recently by President Trump before the American people,” Mattis said in Garmisch, Germany.

Mattis said the U.S. commitment to NATO deployments in eastern European nations that feel threatened by Russia would last at least until 2020. He also pointed to a 42 percent increase in Trump’s budget request for European military spending.

“Beyond any words in the newspapers, you can judge America by such actions,” he said.