If you have paid attention to European defence issues and NATO conversations these past few weeks, you’d have thought that something got into the water in the various capitals which comprise the alliance. Newly-inaugurated President Donald Trump is calling for NATO members to spend at least five per cent of GDP on defence – and unlike in his first term, he has received positive responses from across the Atlantic. Estonia and Lithuania have already agreed, and others have sounded positive notes.
Not everyone has, of course. Portugal excitedly announced it would finally meet the two per cent benchmark – in 2029, the year Trump is scheduled to leave office. Friedrich Merz, the almost-certain next German chancellor, swore off paying attention to numbers entirely: “And the two, three or five per cent are basically irrelevant; what matters is that we do what is necessary to defend ourselves.” Germany is in a particular bind; the country will barely spend two per cent of GDP on defence this year, and it will only be due to a fund set up by current Chancellor Olaf Scholz which is going to expire in 2027.
Merz, perhaps inadvertently, has actually hit the nail on the head: percentage is irrelevant. But this is not a good thing for Europe. In fact, it has been paying attention to per cents which has taken them into such a problem.
American presidents have for years sought to increase Europe’s defence spending. President Barack Obama in 2016 told Europe that it “has sometimes been complacent about its own defence,” a statement that today would be considered milquetoast but one that television network France24 at the time called “blunt.” President Trump, in his first term, was significantly more insistent, highlighting exactly which members were meeting the then-two per cent benchmark, even hosting a lunch with the (only eight) countries who met the benchmark in 2019.
President Joe Biden likewise talked up NATO spending, but tried to credit his gentler approach for the increase across NATO (though much of the increase was due to fuzzy math and promises of more spending, rather than actual spending; some, like the aforementioned Germany, are only going to meet it temporarily). Now that Trump is back in office, he is again demanding increases.
Europe is in a bind here, because they literally do not have enough money to fund their lavish social safety nets and a competent defence; even if they were to indulge the fantasies of some mainstream socialist parties and tax the wealthy to their limit, they still would not have the funds (and they would proceed to further degrade Europe’s capacity for innovation). It is highly unlikely that they will be able to meet the five per cent benchmark, which some countries might not need, as Merz points out. America, for example, does not spend five per cent, and is well-defended.
Trump likely knows that many members cannot reach five per cent. So why does he still push it? Because it is not about the number, at least not anymore. As discussed above, presidents of both parties have tried for years to get Europe to take defence seriously – but they never really did. Even in 2024, Europe was bragging about spending a total of over €325 billion on defence; that is less than China and significantly less than the United States. There were various excuses – “We all speak different languages, how could we work together militarily?” was a particularly rich one on the continent where Allied and Axis powers both worked together just fine – but at the end of the day the truth was that they knew that the United States were going to be there to defend them. There was simply no impetus for action.
Over that same time period, the United States – first a small part of the Republican Party, then almost the whole party, and now much of the country – came to the realisation that, no matter how much it spent, the United States did not really need to spend money to defend Portugal or Bulgaria, the latter of which just got over two per cent last year. Portugal almost has an excuse, but Bulgaria is supposedly on the front line. “Where is their excuse?” originally went the thinking, which in turn led to, “Why are we defending Bulgaria in the first place?”
This thinking should be setting off alarms throughout the continent but has instead been met with something of a “Ho-hum,” as European leadership seems sure that Trump will be sated with promises to eventually rise to higher defence spending. But America is now reorienting its foreign policy toward the national interest and away from a defence of the liberal international order, which means those aforementioned questions – “Forget the funding, why are we even doing this in the first place?” – are being asked in earnest now.
Bulgaria could spend ten per cent of its GDP on defence, but it would not change the fact that Bulgaria’s location is not crucial to America’s national interest. This is not to pick on Bulgaria, of course. But this is to say that, rather than just focus on spending increases (though they should, of course), European leaders should start trying to convince the Trump administration that it is in America’s interest to defend them. They should not do so arguing from a European perspective; “Russia could move incrementally further into eastern Europe” is not something which is going to deeply affect the United States.
But regardless, convincing America to defend them is a task which will be impossible so long as Europeans seem uninterested in defending themselves.
Europe as the Cold War order dies: stagnating, fading, failing, lost