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By Hugh Cameron
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If applied to the U.S., Donald Trump's call for NATO members to boost defense spending could require America to allocate an extra $500 billion each year.
The calculation, made by Russian-born American author and military historian Max Boot, in response to the president-elect's recent demand for the alliance to raise its current spending target for each of its members from 2 to 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
When contacted for comment, the Trump transition team referred Newsweek back to the remarks made by the president-elect during the Tuesday press conference.
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Why It Matters?
In addition to his latest demand—reports of which first surfaced last month—Trump has repeatedly urged NATO members to contribute more toward defense, contending that the United States has footed the bill for European security for far too long, even threatening to withdraw the U.S. from the alliance over this dispute. Other calls for members to increase defense spending have gradually grown since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In November, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said that the alliance would need to surpass its current 2 percent target, agreed to by member states in 2014, calling this "simply not enough" given the threats posed by Russia to the continent, as well as those posed by China, North Korea and Iran.
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What To Know
During a South Carolina campaign rally in February, Trump recounted how he told the president of a NATO member state that, should they fail to increase their defense spending, the U.S. would not protect them and would encourage Russia "to do whatever the hell they want."
"They can all afford it," Trump told reporters at Tuesday's press conference in Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday. "But they should be at 5 percent not 2 percent."
Boot calculated that if the U.S. increased its defense budget to 5 percent of the GDP, it would need to add another $500 billion in spending.
"The US defense budget is $824 billion. That's about 3.1% of GDP. To get to 5% of GDP would mean another $500 billion in defense spending," Boot posted to social media site Bluesky on Wednesday. "Is Trump going to propose that and where will the money come from? Or is 5% only for other countries?"
According to the Atlantic Council in July, most NATO states have increased their defense spending since Russia's invasion, with 23 of the alliance's 32 members currently meeting the 2 percent threshold. As a result, NATO in June said that the collective investment in defense had risen from 1.43 percent of GDP in 2014 to 2.02 percent in 2024. Based on Pentagon projections, the U.S. will have spent 2.7 percent of its GDP on defense spending in 2024.
None of the NATO's members currently spend 5 percent of GDP on defense, the closest being Poland at just over 4 percent.
In August, Polish Finance Minister said that defense spending in the country's 2025 budget would constitute 4.7 percent of GDP, amid growing concern that the country could be targeted by Russia.
Stuart Dee, a research leader in the Defence and Security group at RAND Europe, noted that even meeting the 2 percent target has been difficult for many NATO countries, whose economic frameworks may not accommodate additional increases.
"The United States has long been an outlier and benefits from a significantly larger underlying industrial base and domestic market for defense, which it has readily sustained through a holistic approach to defense exports," Dee told Newsweek. "Even this uplift in spending in some cases to 2 percent or beyond has been a challenge, however, given the inherent opportunity cost of diverting funding from stretched government spending portfolios."
What People Are Saying?
Ralf Stegner, German politician and member of Germany's Social Democrat Party, via Facebook: "Donald Trump wants to confiscate the Panama Canal and Greenland and is demanding 5% of GDP for the NATO partners' defense budgets. That sounds like delusions and is downright insane. Where are the resources supposed to come from to solve the world's real problems? They do not consist primarily of us not having enough weapons - on the contrary: we have too much poverty, environmental destruction, civil wars, migration movements and too few means to combat these more actively."
Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary-General, during a conference in December: "[Trump] wants to make sure that the U.S. is not overspending and we are not doing enough, and he's totally right. I mean, I remember when he became president in 2016, 2017, that he continued to push us, and since he became president we spent 641 billion more than before he came up... . Of course the full onslaught—the full scale onslaught of Russia on Ukraine has also ramped up defense spending, but he was very successful in ramping it up."
Stuart Dee, research leader and co-director of RAND Europe's Centre for Defence Economics and Acquisition, told Newsweek: "There is increasingly strong consensus in the security community that the NATO 2% target for defense—which to a large extent was an arbitrary target based on end-of Cold War logic—is an unrealistic fit with the rapidly evolving international security environment...here is a growing consensus in parallel that the United States is increasingly pulled in multiple directions and thus Europe will need to secure its own future in defense terms; intelligent management of acquisition profiles will be key to ensuring that an increased funding delta is well spent."
What Happens Next?
In December, Rutte said that NATO is "going to need a lot more than 2 percent" to counter threats posed by Russia, even arguing that states should divert spending from domestic programs to this end.
Allies, however, have pushed back against extreme increases to spending targets, with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz recently calling such ideas "half-baked," and questioning where nations will source the additional funds needed.
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