Barack Obama has urged Britain, as one of the twin pillars of Nato, to find a way to maintain UK defence spending at 2% of GDP.

The US president made his views known directly to David Cameron in a one-hour bilateral on the margins of the G7 summit, the first time the two men have met since Cameron was re-elected prime minister.

Obama raised the issue near the end of their bilateral meeting stressing the importance to western security that Nato maintains defence spending in face of threats facing the west in the Middle East, north Africa and Russia.

Cameron is under intense fiscal pressure to cut defence spending, but is one of the Nato leaders that most urged other countries to pledge to meet the 2% target.

The British prime minister stressed to Obama how much Britain is already committed militarily. A decision on UK defence spending through to 2020 awaits both a defence review and the outcome of a Spending Review in the Autumn .



In the budget cuts announced last week George Osborne revealed that defence spending was being slashed by £500m.

Meanwhile, Cameron said that Britain is to increase its military deployment in Iraq by a further 125 troops, taking the total number of UK military personnel involved in Iraq-related missions to 900.



Cameron and Obama are due to meet the Iraqi president, Haider al-Abadi, and it is expected they will discuss the continued setbacks in the fight against Isis. The talks are expected to focus on communications equipment, training Iraqi troops and the handling of improvised explosive devices.

The UK troops, many with experience from Afghanistan, will help with IED training in four locations in Iraq including Taji, Besmaya and al-Asad.

A further 25 additional personnel will provide training in other critical skills, including medical, equipment maintenance, manoeuvre support for bridging and crossing trenches and information operations. This will take the total number of UK personnel providing training support to the Iraqi security forces to more than 275.

The decision follows a request from Iraq last week for additional international support in the fight against Isis and discussions by Britain’s National Security Council about what more the government should do to protect the UK from terrorism.

Cameron is due to raise again efforts to train moderate Syrian opposition forces in locations outside Syria. He said: “The biggest challenge that we face in terms of the effect on Britain and the challenge in the world is fighting extremist Islamist terror, particularly obviously in Iraq and Syria, but more broadly. We’re already the second largest contributor in terms of air strikes in Iraq.”

Downing Street said: “The C-IED training targets a particular tactic used by [Isis] terrorists who are well known for their intensive use of explosives when retreating. Upskilling the Iraqi security forces in this area will allow them to clear territory safely and return it to local people who have been displaced.”

The UK has already trained more than 1,400 Iraqi security forces personnel, including 150 counter-IED specialists, and gifted the Iraqi government 1,000 IED detectors.

Downing Street denied that it was being dragged into a form of mission creep, saying: “It is consistent with our approach so far in tackling the evil that is Isis. This is exactly what we’ve been doing already.”

Obama is likely to challenge Cameron on his role on the international stage now that he is free of the Liberal Democrats in coalition, including whether he intends to maintain defence spending at 2% of GDP, the target set for all Nato countries.

Cameron gave no commitment on the projected level of UK defence spending in 2020 but said: “We spend 2% on defence. We’ve kept our promise of 0.7% on aid, and we use that money, yes, because Britain’s a country with a moral conscience. We don’t walk on by when there are these challenges.

“But we do so in a way that actually protects and defends the interests of British people. Is it in our interest that we get stuck in in Sierra Leone to eradicate the Ebola threat? Yes, of course it is, because in the end that threat will come home and hit us, as it very nearly did recently.”

Asked whether defence spending would remain at its current level, Cameron replied: “We’ll be having a spending review in the autumn and you’ll have to wait for the outcome of that.”