NATO allies show Trump they are trying to pay up for defense

Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO, speaks alongside a chart while meeting with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, on Wednesday, June 24, 2026. A year ago, President Trump told fellow NATO allies to more than double their defense spending as the United States looked to draw down American military forces in Europe. (Alex Kent/The New York Times)

By LARA JAKES

A year ago, President Donald Trump told fellow NATO allies to more than double their defense spending as the United States looked to draw down American military forces in Europe.

On Tuesday, at a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, top officials at the military alliance sought to show that countries are paying up.

“We’re already making remarkable progress,” Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary-general, said at the start of a defense industry forum Tuesday, ahead of the alliance’s annual leaders’ meeting Wednesday. “Here we are now, one year later in Ankara, already delivering results.”

The stakes are high for Rutte and the alliance. Trump demanded that the allies increase military spending to 5% of their gross national product by 2035. Meeting that target will determine how quickly Europe can credibly deter adversaries without the level of military support that the United States has provided since NATO was created 77 years ago.

Some countries are making significant progress, shelling out large amounts of money to bolster their militaries with new weapons and additional troops, and increasing NATO’s spending on countries’ armed forces by $90 billion in a single year. Five countries are already projected to meet the 5% GDP benchmark this year, according to NATO data released Tuesday.

Others, like Albania and Slovenia, are struggling.

Still others, like Britain and France, are trying but face serious budgetary problems.

And a few have padded their budgets with projects that stretch the definition of military investments — even if they technically might pass muster under new NATO spending guidelines approved last year.

Those guidelines direct allies to spend 3.5% of GDP on direct military priorities like troops and weapons. The allies can also spend an additional 1.5% on defense-related projects like improving transportation routes that would carry military materiel to a battleground or bases, bolstering civilian infrastructure from cyber attacks, refurbishing parking garages to create bomb shelters and building hospitals that, in part, care for veterans.

That’s where some countries are pushing the boundaries.

Take, for example, the Czech Republic’s plans to upgrade train tracks ​​that take tourists to a 14th-century castle.

The rail improvements to the town of Karlstejn were part of a $1.1 billion transportation package that the Czech government cast as defense-related expenses to meet the spending targets.

While some routes in the package could, potentially, be used by armed forces, when it comes to the tracks to Karlstejn, “it’s impossible to find any military dimension of that at all,” said Mojmir Hampl, the head of the independent but state-funded Czech Fiscal Council, which audits the Czech government.

The United States is projected to spend just under 3.2% of GDP on core defense priorities this year, according to the new NATO figures.

NATO officials said that nearly all allies agreed it was past time to spend more on defense, which was underfunded for years, and especially as Russia has brought war to the alliance’s border with Ukraine.

Countries that do not appear to be making an effort to increase defense spending could face further U.S. military cuts. Several senior U.S. officials, including one publicly at Tuesday’s NATO summit, suggested that financial support to allies to buy American weapons would be used as leverage to make sure lagging countries step up. The two others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive political matters. One of the officials said potential U.S. loans through the Foreign Military Financing program could be at risk.

The consequences of defying Trump and delaying long-needed defense investments are intertwined. The mercurial president is already pulling out weapons and threatening to withdraw U.S. forces from Europe, where Rutte has said militaries are unable to defend themselves from potential aggressions without the United States.

“Let’s be honest — the money is not the biggest issue from a NATO perspective, although politically it’s become that because of Trump,” said Paul Savereux, who worked on the alliance’s internal auditing process for more than 20 years before retiring in 2023. “The reality is, we want NATO to have the forces it needs to be able to do whatever it wants to do.”

Germany is expanding its forces and spending billions of dollars on weapons and new equipment. The three Baltic nations — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — are buying so many drones, air defenses and ammunition rounds that each country is projected to reach the target of 5% GDP this year, as are Poland and Greece. Denmark and Norway are not far behind.

They are part of what is being called “the 3.5 club” — countries that are making strides to meet the direct military spending requirement.

“We are really hoping that all the allies will do the same,” Hanno Pevkur, Estonia’s defense minister, said at NATO headquarters in June. “It is necessary for the alliance.”

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez of Spain has defiantly said he does not need to spend 5% GDP to fund his military priorities and has not increased defense investments beyond 2% GDP in the year since Trump demanded the change. Spain has the lowest military spending of any NATO nation, the new data show.