Nato targets 5% defence spending to appease Trump

Nato allies have started cobbling together an agreement to significantly boost defence spending in a way that may assuage US President Donald Trump’s demand to spend 5 per cent of economic output on the military.

Negotiators in the military alliance are making progress on a path to achieve 5 per cent of gross domestic product on defence and defence-related spending by 2032 ahead of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in The Hague in June, according to diplomats familiar with the matter. Nato foreign ministers were set to discuss the initiative at a meeting in the Turkish resort city of Antalya on Wednesday and Thursday.

The Mediterranean meeting takes place against a rush of diplomacy as the Trump administration pushes to end the war in Ukraine that has dragged on for more than three years. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he is prepared to meet face-to-face with Vladimir Putin in Istanbul on Thursday as the warring sides grapple with demands for a ceasefire. The Russian leader has given no sign that he will come.

Agreement on defence spending on the scale that Trump demands – none of Nato’s 32 members, including the United States, has achieved that threshold – would mark the biggest spending increase by Western allies since the end of the Cold War as Nato members retrench since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Since his first term, Trump has hectored allies for failing to meet a long-standing 2 per cent of GDP threshold for spending. Eight of 32 allies had not reached 2 per cent spending as of Nato’s annual report in April.

Secretary General Mark Rutte is pushing allies to agree to a level of 3.5 per cent of GDP in the next seven years, topped by an extra 1.5 per cent earmarked for a wider set of spending related to defence, according to senior diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss talks being held behind closed doors.

  

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