Last year, European allies in NATO and Canada increased their defense spending by almost 20 percent to around 500 billion euros. This is stated in NATO’s annual report, according to which all member states in 2025 have reached or exceeded the set goal of spending at least two percent of their GDP on defense. At the same time, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte expressed the expectation that the countries will demonstrate at the July summit in Turkey that they are on a clear and credible path to increasing spending to five percent of GDP. TASR informs about it according to the report of the AFP agency.
- European NATO allies and Canada increased defense spending by a fifth.
- All NATO member states already allocate at least two percent of GDP to defense.
- The Allies agreed to increase defense spending to five percent of GDP.
- Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland have so far exceeded the new threshold of three and a half percent of GDP.
- Donald Trump sharply criticizes NATO for insufficient assistance to the United States against Iran.
Increasing investment in defense
European states have generally accepted US President Donald Trump’s demand that they take more responsibility for their own security. Following pressure from Trump, at the NATO summit in The Hague in June, the allies pledged to significantly increase defense investment to five percent of their GDP by 2035. Of this, 3.5 percent should go to the military alone and 1.5 percent to spending in related areas such as infrastructure.
The goal of two percent of GDP, which the allies agreed on in 2014, was reached or exceeded by all NATO member states last year. According to the annual report, only three countries exceeded the newly established limit of 3.5 percent of GDP last year – Lithuania, Latvia and Poland.
“I expect the Allies to demonstrate at the upcoming NATO summit in Ankara that they are on a clear and credible path to achieving the five percent target,” Rutte wrote at the beginning of the report, stressing that “a strong transatlantic bond remains essential in times of global uncertainty.”
Trump criticizes NATO for inaction in the US war with Iran
Last year, all NATO countries saw an increase in defense spending, but three of them saw a slight decrease in the share of this spending in GDP. These are the Czech Republic, Hungary and also the United States, although their spending is still significantly higher than the investments of all other allies combined. According to estimates, Slovakia spent a total of almost 2.8 billion euros on defense in 2025, which represents approximately 2.06 percent of GDP.
US President Donald Trump again criticized NATO on Thursday, which he said “has done absolutely nothing” to help the United States with Iran. He declared that the US “doesn’t need anything from the Alliance, but it will never forget this extremely important moment in history.”
