EU CONFIDENTIAL

8 NATO countries to hit defense spending target

NATO secretary-general gives his support to EU defense coordination and Trump-Putin summit.

Stoltenberg said three additional NATO members will in 2018 meet a pledge to spend 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense | Nicolas Lambert/EPA

Jens Stoltenberg has a present for Donald Trump ahead of the NATO summit next week.

The secretary-general of the military alliance said more NATO members will in 2018 meet a pledge to spend 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense.

“In 2014 it was three allies” who met the pledge, Stoltenberg said. “Now this year I expect eight allies to meet that pledge.”

Stoltenberg revealed NATO’s estimate in an interview with POLITICO’s EU Confidential podcast, but declined to name the extra countries that would hit the target this year.

According to NATO’s most recent estimate, released in June 2017, six EU countries hit the 2 percent target: the United States, Greece, the United Kingdom, Estonia, Romania and Poland. The latter two countries scraped across the line at 2.02 percent and 2.01 percent respectively.

While France is the next closest to the target, with defense spending at 1.79 percent of GDP, a NATO spokesperson said that Lithuania and Latvia would beat Paris to hitting 2 percent, and are expected to do so in 2018.

Whether the news will please Trump for long is another matter: Even with eight NATO allies hitting the target, that leaves 21 falling short.

Still, Stoltenberg urged calm. “We didn’t promise that all allies should spend 2 percent within a year or next year,” he said, pointing out that NATO allies gave themselves a decade to hit the pledge back in 2014.

Stoltenberg’s own country of Norway spends 1.59 percent of GDP on defense and the NATO chief issued a mea culpa regarding his time in national politics. “When I was minister of finance in Norway in the 1990s I was responsible for cutting defense budgets in Norway,” he admitted.

The NATO secretary-general mounted a strong defense of the EU’s efforts to increase defense cooperation, saying that NATO desperately needs that sort of EU action because after Brexit “80 percent of NATO’s defense expenditure will come from non-EU allies.”

“NATO has welcomed the EU efforts to develop new capabilities under a European defense fund, to finance new abilities and research. We can welcome this because it has been being so clearly stated by many European leaders that this is not about creating an alternative to NATO, it’s not competing,” Stoltenberg said.

On the substance of the summit, in Brussels on July 11-12, Stoltenberg said NATO-watchers should look out for a decision to “establish our operational cyber center to strengthen our cyberdefenses.”

Stoltenberg also made a plea for positivity among NATO’s allies: “My message to all allies is that actually we have a very good story to tell. After decades of cutting defense spending we decided back in 2014 that while the world has become more dangerous we need to invest more in our security and we decided to stop the cuts and start to increase. And that’s exactly what we have done.”

On Russia, Stoltenberg welcomed Trump’s planned meeting with Vladimir Putin on July 16. “We are in favor of what we call a dual-track approach to Russia. We need strong defense combined with dialogue. For us there is no contradiction between defense or dialogue,” he said.

“As long as we are united, as long as we are firm in our approach to Russia, we can also engage in political dialogue with them. We don’t want a new Cold War. We don’t want a new arms race. Russia is our neighbor and Russia is there to stay. So we need dialogue,” Stoltenberg said.

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