Even before the Ukraine war, defense spending had increased significantly in the member states.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has been campaigning for a military build-up in NATO countries for years.
Not so long ago, the dispute over the two percent target threatened to tear NATO apart. Former US President Donald Trump in particular has repeatedly accused the allies of spending too little money on defense. It is true that the Allies had agreed many years ago that each member should invest two percent of national economic output in the armed forces. But it wasn’t until Trump threatened to withdraw from NATO in 2018 that most allies gave up their reluctance.
Satisfaction for Stoltenberg
The NATO countries spent around 1.06 trillion euros on the military last year – at least 5.8 percent more than in the previous year. However, by far the largest part of this went to the USA, which invested €729 billion in defense in 2021, more than twice as much money as all 29 NATO members combined. These figures come from the Alliance’s latest annual report, which NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg presented on Thursday.
Even before Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine, the NATO countries had significantly upgraded. Stoltenberg, who was able to settle the dispute with Trump, had repeatedly campaigned for this in front of or behind the scenes. The Norwegian gave the latent tensions with Russia as one of the reasons, which not all European governments have taken equally seriously in recent years. Paradoxically, when Stoltenberg took office in 2014, NATO’s military spending had reached a post-Cold War low — even though Russian soldiers had occupied Crimea that same year and the Kremlin was instigating a war in eastern Ukraine.
With the invasion of February 24, the Secretary General’s darkest forebodings came true. Stoltenberg, who has been talking about the “new normal” ever since, welcomed the announcement by pacifist Germany on Thursday that it would invest a one-time “special fund” of 100 billion euros for defense. He also praised Italy, which aims to reach the two percent mark by 2028, and he mentioned Poland, which in future plans to spend as much as three percent of gross domestic product on defense. According to Stoltenberg, there is a “new sense of urgency to invest in our security” throughout Allianz.
Other cost structures
Although NATO’s defense budget seems huge compared to Russia and China, experts warn against using the numbers as an argument to put the brakes on arms spending again. For example, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) estimates Russia’s military budget at just 56 billion euros last year, while China’s spending was an estimated 186 billion euros. According to the IISS, however, thanks to different cost structures, Moscow and Beijing get comparatively more clout from the money invested.