NATO will boost defense spending to help back Ukraine but the math is tricky. Just ask Luxembourg
abcnews.go.comNATO leaders are set to make a new defense spending pledge at their summit this week as support for Ukraine eats into their military budgets
BRUSSELS — When it comes to criticizing the NATO members who fail to spend enough on defense, tiny Luxembourg is an easy target.
One of NATO’s richest countries, and routinely ranked at the top of Europe’s economic growth tables, the Grand Duchy currently spends 0.72% of gross domestic product on its armed forces, according to the organization's estimates for this year.
That puts it at the foot of the 31-nation military alliance’s charts. Still, the numbers are deceiving, and that goes for other members too, like Germany.
Under a pledge made in 2014, after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, NATO allies agreed to halt the spending cuts they made in calmer times after the Cold War ended, boost their national military budgets and move toward spending 2% of GDP on defense by 2024.
With that target date closing in, and the biggest land war in Europe in decades ravaging Ukraine, U.S. President Joe Biden and his NATO counterparts will commit to a new spending goal at their two-day summit in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius starting on Tuesday.
“At the summit, allies will set a more ambitious defense investment pledge, to invest a minimum of 2% of GDP annually on defense,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Friday. No date will be set for achieving this target.
While the 2% figure remains as a reference point, it’s a slippery metric.
Growth fluctuates in times of economic boom and bust, and inflation can wreak havoc with the bottom line. NATO estimates that Turkey, with one of the organization’s biggest armed forces, will spend just 1.31% of GDP in 2023, compared to 1.91%
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