Privately, European officials say they are acutely aware they will have to earmark more money to keep the Trump team invested. The question is how much more they need to do to stay out of Trump’s crosshairs.
Finding the cash and the public backing will not be easy — especially if Europe’s struggling economies are further hobbled by new U.S. tariffs.
Upon his return to the White House, Trump said NATO countries should hike defense spending to 5 percent of annual economic output. That’s more than double the Western alliance’s current 2 percent target and well above what the United States itself spends.
European diplomats see this as a bargaining tactic. Many expect NATO to settle on a new target, closer to 3 or 3.5 percent of gross domestic product, at the next summit in June.
But with the Trump team in Europe this week — for an AI summit in Paris, NATO meetings in Brussels and the annual security conference in Munich — the haggling over spending and related defense issues has begun.
While Trump took a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, the new administration’s plans for the Ukraine war dominated the talks in Brussels. Ukrainian officials said they haven’t yet seen a peace plan from the White House. But on Wednesday, Hegseth endorsed a land-for-peace approach to negotiations and set limits on the support Ukraine can expect for its demands. “Returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” he said. “Chasing this illusory goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.”
There are some big unknowns about the Trump team’s plans in Europe. “But what we know for sure is that Trump will increase pressure” to spend more, said a NATO diplomat, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal discussions. “It’s one of those classic negotiations where if the model is under pressure, everything becomes doable.”
Not just a numbers game
“We have to do this,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte told reporters Wednesday. “And not only because President Trump is asking us to do this, but because we have to defend ourselves.” It may not be easy to “make sure the money is there,” Rutte said, “but it needs to be done, and I think the large majority of political leaders understand that.”
Meeting a higher spending target will be more difficult for some NATO countries than for others. Some aren’t even meeting the current 2 percent goal. Spending as a share of GDP tends to be higher the closer countries are to Russia and Ukraine. Poland spent more than 4 percent last year and is planning to approach 5 percent this year. Next is Estonia — and the Baltics have pledged major increases to their military budgets.
The United States spends about 3.4 percent of its GDP on defense. Hegseth said this week that he agrees with Trump’s 5 percent target for other NATO allies, but he demurred when asked if the United States should be bound by that, too.
“At a minimum, we should not go below 3 percent,” he said. “Any defense secretary would be lying if they didn’t say they want more. You always want more. … But we live in fiscally constrained times where we need to be responsible with taxpayer dollars.”
European diplomats said negotiations over the next few months could yield a new target while allowing allies a few years to reach it.
“It’s not a symbolic conversation over a number — 0.1 percent can be billions of dollars,” a European diplomat said. “It can collapse governments. It’s money you could spend on health care or elsewhere. We want to do it because there’s a broad conviction we need to, and because it shows Trump we’re ready to.”
Buy American — for Europe and Ukraine
What they don’t want at NATO HQ is a repeat of the drama from Trump’s last presidency, when he rattled Washington’s closest military partners and threatened to turn his back on them if they didn’t meet targets.
European officials privately complain that the “Europe needs to do more” mantra doesn’t reflect that they have been doing more. European governments have increased military spending to the highest levels since the Cold War.
Officials also point to their record on sending aid to Ukraine as it fights off Russian advances. They have further increased their share in the past year, partly to hedge against a policy shift from Trump. In many cases, that spending doesn’t count toward the official NATO target.
NATO officials said Wednesday that allies in Europe along with Canada spent 20 percent more on defense in 2024 than the year before. And those countries paid about half the share of military aid sent to Kyiv last year, they announced.
Still, Kyiv has relied heavily on military aid from the United States. European stocks don’t match the Pentagon’s, and some supplies are running dry after years of dispatching equipment to Ukraine.
In European defense circles, there is debate about whether to pledge to buy more U.S.-made weapons to appease Trump, bolster their arsenals and keep support flowing to Ukraine. Opponents of the idea argue it would hamstring European efforts to invest in their own industries and defies the point of relying less on Washington.
Rutte said last month that Europeans could foot the bill for U.S. weapons to be sent to Kyiv, “if the new Trump administration is willing to keep on supplying Ukraine from its defense industrial base.”
Leaders are more divided on the question of buying U.S. weapons for their collective defense, as the European Union discusses pooling money for weapons systems. France maintains that such taxpayer money should be spent on European systems, while others argue that excluding U.S. arms-makers from future E.U. investments could provoke Trump’s ire.
Guns vs. butter
To win Trump over, Rutte has repeatedly said the president “is right” and credited the U.S. president for helping to spur Europe’s defense spending push.
The NATO chief has also warned that Russia and China are churning out equipment much faster, and that it’s time for Europe to “shift to a war mindset” to maintain deterrence. If spending doesn’t go up, “get out your Russian-language courses or go to New Zealand,” he recently told European lawmakers.
Europe’s defense spending drive, though, is already running up against the constraints of flagging economies and efforts to rein in national budgets, notably in Germany and France.
Rutte has suggested the need for “sacrifices” — possibly tax hikes or benefit cuts. But the message to spend a little less on health care or retirement benefits and more on tanks is a tough sell for war-weary voters in much of Europe. Many people feel poorer after years of rising grocery bills and energy prices. Far-right movements have seized on the grievances to weaken the political center.
Most European leaders “are confronting the cold, hard reality of the return of belligerence to their borders,” said Rym Momtaz, editor of Carnegie Europe’s blog Strategic Europe. “But they’re still not doing it fast enough or big enough to count against their adversaries or convince their most important ally, the U.S., to keep its end of the transatlantic security bargain.”
In Brussels, home to NATO and the European Union, some are also eager to remind the Trump team that the United States gets something out of the transatlantic relationship, too.
“The Americans spent decades building this apparatus for their own interests, as well,” the European diplomat said. “We can have a discussion about us doing more in Europe so that they can focus more on the Indo-Pacific, but that’s different than the U.S. just saying, ‘Okay, bye now.’”
“We very much still see the U.S. as an ally,” he added, “but if they were to completely abandon us, can they really expect us to remain steadfast allies?”
Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.
