After the vindictive exit of Donald Trump, NATO continues to defend itself.
A majority of the member countries of the Atlantic Alliance will validate the military spending objective set for 2024, its Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, said on Wednesday.
Enough to respond to the criticism of the probable Republican candidate for the American presidential election, who had attacked European bad payers a few days earlier.
Eighteen nations out of 31 will reach the 2% of GDP mark in military spending this year, a floor set by the organization, its leader assured.
A “record figure”, he congratulated himself to the press, just before a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels.
A sign of a notable acceleration in investment, only 11 countries achieved this objective last year, and only three ten years ago.
“We are making real progress, the European allies are spending more,” insisted Jens Stoltenberg, calling for “not to weaken the credibility of NATO’s deterrence”.
“We must leave no room for possible miscalculations or misunderstandings in Moscow regarding our degree of preparation, our commitment and our determination to protect the Allies,” he added.
NATO has not disclosed the list of countries that have reached the 2% target, but Germany has indicated that it will be part of it this year and France next year.
“Still a long way to go”
These statements are a direct response to Donald Trump's outbursts, which triggered the anger of several leaders of members of the Alliance on Sunday.
If Washington has long called for an increase in defense spending by European countries, which represent 29 of the 31 members of NATO, the former American president drove the point home with a speech openly hostile to the organization.
If he were elected to the White House, he threatened not to intervene to support member countries that did not invest sufficiently in their defenses in the event of an attack by Russia, an increasingly feared since the war in Ukraine.
“You have to pay your bills,” he said.
Comments deemed “dangerous” or “irresponsible” by several leaders of allied countries, including American President Joe Biden himself, Donald Trump’s likely competitor in the vote, or German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
This type of declaration “undermines the security of all of us, including that of the United States,” Jens Stoltenberg also reacted in the wake of the former American president's speech.
The head of NATO, however, estimated this Wednesday that much remained to be done regarding the military investment of several members: “some allies still have a long way to go,” he stressed.
Before recalling that “we agreed at the summit (in Vilnius in Lithuania, held in July 2023) that all allies should invest 2% and that this 2% was a minimum”.
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Why Europe is far from being able to do without NATO and the United States
Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 helped encourage Europeans to invest more in their defenses, but it is since Moscow's invasion of Ukraine that this 2% threshold has become a floor. and no longer a spending ceiling.
For now, the United States remains by far the largest contributor to NATO's budget.