By Andrew Gray
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Defence spending by NATO’s European members and Canada was 20% higher in 2024 than the previous year, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said on Friday, ahead of a meeting in which they are likely to come under renewed U.S. pressure to spend more.
U.S. President Donald Trump has stepped up calls on fellow NATO members to ramp up their spending on defence, which he frequently demanded during his first term in office.
Many members have been anxious to show that they have taken his message on board and have already increased military spending, particularly since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
NATO said the 20% boost by the alliance’s non-U.S. members took their total defence spending to more than $485 billion.
“I’m looking forward to hosting defence ministers at NATO next week where we’ll talk about investing more and better in defence,” Rutte said in response to a Reuters request to NATO for the latest spending figures.
“We’ve crunched the numbers. They’re going up. In fact, spending by Europe and Canada is up 20% in 2024, bringing the total additional investment in recent years from $640 to $700 billion.”
NATO said “recent years” referred to the period since 2014, when members of the transatlantic military alliance agreed on a goal of spending 2% of gross domestic product (GDP) on defence.
According to NATO estimates published last year, 23 of the alliance’s 32 members now meet that goal.
But Trump said last month that NATO members should now spend 5% of gross domestic product (GDP) on defence – a level that no NATO country, including the United States, currently reaches.
Last year, the United States accounted for about two-thirds of all defence spending by NATO members, according to NATO data.
NATO said it could not make further spending figures available for the moment. But it is expected to release more at Wednesday’s meeting of alliance defence ministers, which will include a debut for Trump’s Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth.
(Reporting by Andrew Gray; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
