As NATO Countries Reach Spending Milestone, Is 2 Percent Enough?

Liana Fix and Caroline Kapp

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NATO leaders stand next to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as he speaks on the sidelines of the 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. Kay Nietfeld/Getty Images

It has taken longer than many NATO militaries had hoped, but it seems that the alliance has finally turned the corner on so-called burden sharing. This year, for the first time, most members are expected to meet their decade-old defense spending pledges. But with the slogging Russia-Ukraine war on the borders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and uncertainties about future U.S. commitments to European security, even reaching this goal could be insufficient.

Following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, NATO countries committed to the goal of spending 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on defense. A decade later, renewed Russian aggression culminating in the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine brought this commitment, particularly many European member countries’ failure to meet it in recent years, into the spotlight.

In 2023, only the United States and a handful of European countries in Russia’s vicinity met or exceeded the spending benchmark. Many of Europe’s largest economies—Germany, France, Italy, and Spain—fell short. This year, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the alliance, which will be marked with a summit in Washington in July, will look different. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced that in 2024 non-U.S. NATO allies will meet the 2 percent target on average for the first time, and twenty-three out of the thirty-two total member countries will meet or exceed the 2 percent target, including France and Germany.