Donald Trump complains that some European countries are not pulling their financial weight in NATO, euronews has been looking at who spends what on the Alliance
ADVERTISEMENTIn 2014 NATO countries agreed to spend two percent of gross domestic product on defence every year up to 2024. The target is described as a guideline and there is no penalty for not meeting it.
In March, NATO released the figures for 2017 and only a handful of countries hit or bettered the two percent target.
The U.S. spent the most at 3.57 percent of GDP; the second highest spender, perhaps surprisingly, was Greece. The UK came in at 2.12 percent. The member that spent the least was Luxembourg at 0.46 percent, well short of the target.
Estonia and Poland have significantly increased their spending since the 2014 NATO summit where members agreed the two percent target. That was in response to Russia’s annexation of the Crimea region, which came after 25 years of cuts to European defence budgets.
Nevertheless, European Council President Donald Tusk maintains that as a whole the EU spends more on defence than China and Russia.
In the next Multi-annual Financial Framework, the European Commission proposes increasing defence and security spending to 27.5 billion euros - that would take up 2.4 percent of the total MFF budget.
Thirteen billion euros of that would be dedicated to the European Defence Fund over the next seven years, but no one knows if that will be enough to convince Donald Trump of Europe's commitment to NATO.
Here is the estimated spending per NATO country for 2018:
