NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte informed US President Donald Trump on Tuesday 24 June – in a message made public by Trump – that all the Allies had agreed to a new defence spending target representing 5% of their GDP.
“It was not easy but we’ve got them all signed onto 5 percent” Rutte told Trump, adding that Trump had achieved “something NO American president in decades could get done”. “Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win”, he added.
Slovakia and Belgium are calling for flexibility. However, the day before, the Slovak Prime Minister, Robert Fico, had announced in a press release that he was opposed to an increase in defence spending for his country, explaining that “Slovakia has other priorities than armament in the coming years, at a time of healing public budgets and catching up with the average EU living standard”.
Slovakia, therefore “must, similar to Spain (see EUROPE 13665/10), reserve the sovereign right to decide at what pace and in what structure it is prepared to increase the Defence Ministry budget with the aim of achieving the NATO target in 2035” and is able to meet NATO’s requirements even without a marked increase in defence spending of 5% of GDP.
Mr Fico added that, in the 2026 budget, he would “not support any increase in spending on weapons systems beyond the 2025 level and that any increase in the Defence Ministry budget and outlays next year will go to dual-use projects like roads and hospitals”.
For his part, Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot also warned that his country would be going to the summit “with requests for maximum flexibility”, because “Belgium is currently in a budgetary situation that does not make it feasible in the short or medium term to reach the infamous 3.5%, compared with the figure of 2% today, with regard to pure military spending”. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)