NATO allies to lift military spending

BRUSSELS — NATO nations are increasing spending on defense, NATO SecretaryGeneral Jens Stoltenberg said Friday, ahead of a summit in London next week where President Donald Trump is expected to push leaders yet again to increase military expenditures.

Stoltenberg said that European allies and Canada are now projected to increase spending on their national military budgets by around $130 billion between 2016 and 2020. Previously, the figure was forecast to be “more than $100 billion.”

Stoltenberg said nine of the alliance’s 29 members are meeting the guideline of spending at least 2% of their gross domestic product on defense. That’s up from eight countries last year; the list now includes Bulgaria, according to figures released by the military alliance.

EU countries and Canada have collectively boosted their defense spending every year since 2015, motivated first by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to unilaterally annex the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine, and then by Trump’s threats to pull the United States from NATO if they did not ante up more cash.

“All NATO allies decided to invest more, and now we are delivering on that,” Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels, where the 29-member trans-Atlantic military alliance has a new billion-dollar headquarters.

NATO leaders agreed in 2014 to spend at least 2% of GDP on defense by 2024, a goal that many of them have struggled to achieve. Many of the nations had cut defense spending after the end of the Cold War.

Bulgaria’s passing grade may be only temporary. It is purchasing eight F-16 fighter jets this year, a major but one-time outlay that brought its spending up to 3.25% of GDP, second only to the United States when measured in comparison to the size of the economy.

Before the decision to buy the jets, the country’s defense spending was estimated at 1.61% of GDP this year, solidly in the middle of the pack at NATO. Bulgaria’s GDP is about $65 billion, roughly half that of Arkansas.

Apart from the United States and Bulgaria, the other countries that meet the goals are Greece, Britain, Estonia, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland.

The United States spends 3.42% of its economic output on defense — the largest percentage of any other NATO ally, and more total dollars than all its NATO allies combined.

While Trump has said the NATO allies are not pulling their weight, the countries do not owe the United States any money.

Germany, often a target of Trump’s ire, is forecast to reach defense spending of just 1.5% of GDP by 2024, but it does intend to move to 2% by around 2031. Indeed, Berlin’s plan to increase its national defense budget accounts for around 20% of the $130 billion increase trumpeted by Stoltenberg.

Friday was the third day in a row that NATO has announced some new budget or defense measure. On Wednesday, Stoltenberg unveiled a new contract for an upgrade of the alliance’s aging fleet of U.S.-made surveillance planes worth $1 billion.

Then on Thursday, allies agreed to further limit the U.S. contribution to the central NATO budget — the bucket of money that pays to operate the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels as well as a handful of military headquarters around Europe.

The United States will now pay no more than the NATO member with the next-largest economy, Germany, capping its contribution at 16% into the $2.5 billion annual budget starting in 2021. The United States previously paid about 22%. The change saves Washington about $150 million a year, which will be made up for by the other NATO allies — apart from France, which thought the exercise was frivolous, according to diplomats familiar with the discussions.

But next week’s meeting comes at a moment in which alliance divisions are on display more than ever, with French President Emmanuel Macron declaring NATO “brain dead.”

On Thursday, after a meeting with Stoltenberg, Macron said that he believed that terrorism needed to be a higher priority for the alliance than Russia, comments that unnerved eastern European countries that still fear a direct threat from the Kremlin.

“We should not be surprised that sometimes we disagree,” Stoltenberg said. “But the strength of NATO is that we always have been able to overcome our disagreements.”