NATO members have agreed to more than double their defense spending in a move widely lauded as a historic step toward a more equal security relationship between the United States and its European partners. The effort may also be redefining concepts of military defense.
Each member’s target security budget is now 5% of national gross domestic product. But of that, 3.5% of GDP is going toward traditional military spending – troops and hardware like guns and fighter jets – and 1.5% is planned to be domestic projects that count as defense spending, too.
This “defense-adjacent spending” can include everything from improving roads and railways to better accommodate tanks to fuzzier “soft power” items like societal resilience.
Why We Wrote This
European nations have pledged more NATO funding partly through a novel redefinition of “defense.” From bridges to efforts at civilian resilience, the new efforts are criticized as gimmicks by some, but others see a more holistic approach to security.
This comes after years of complaints by President Donald Trump that NATO members have been taking advantage of U.S. military largesse. Following the late-June NATO summit at The Hague, the president said he was pleased with the outcome, calling it “a big win for Europe and … Western civilization.”
Others see it as an invitation for creative accounting. By way of example, some point to Italy’s plans to build a bridge it has sought since ancient times, connecting Sicily with the mainland. At an estimated cost of $16 billion, it’s long been deemed prohibitively pricey. With the argument that it could help move NATO troops south should the need arise, it could now count toward Italy’s 5% goal.
“If defense is understood as a whole-of-society effort, what can genuinely be excluded from the accounting?” a report from the Bertelsmann Foundation, a German think tank, asks.
Yet this sizable range of security projects could also broaden and shift the definition of what safety means in helpful ways, analysts say, by shoring up the democracies of the alliance through investments in everything from child care to commercial undersea cables to investments in Indigenous communities. Such spending comes with the message that defense means many different things, that it matters, and that citizens have a critical role to play in keeping their countries safe.
“There’s a reason that societal cohesion is so important,” says Rachel Rizzo, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center. “Cracks and fissures are … easily exploitable by our would-be adversaries.”
Building this unity means reaching out to skeptical European citizens, too, since the defense spending hikes come with concerns that NATO states “will take those billions from health care, from social security, from education,” Marcos Perestrello, the Portuguese president of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, told an audience at The Hague.
In fact, many NATO countries are still figuring out where the money will come from. Belgium’s foreign minister said his country has three options: to reduce government spending, to take on more debt, or to generate new revenue, potentially through taxation.
Since these are not particularly popular choices, the alliance plans to push the idea that citizens will reap rewards like jobs through investments in technology and space with the newly pledged NATO funds, said Mr. Perestrello, a member of his country’s Socialist party.
There are existential benefits as well, he added. “We need to be able to explain that you have no health care, no education, and no social security if you have no security.”
An East-West divide within NATO
Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it’s been a maxim that the further from the front lines, the less interested citizens will be in bigger defense budgets.
This was born out by some person-on-the-street videos shot by summit organizers and aired in between policy talks at the gathering. Respondents answered questions about, among other things, being drafted and whether they supported their countries budgeting more for defense.
A young man named Tom from Luxembourg said he’s open to boosting military spending, “but in a reasonable amount so as not to provoke Russian invasion.”
One Eastern European panelist, upon seeing the video, pronounced himself provoked by Tom’s answer.
In another discussion, Latvian Minister of Defense Andris Sprūds said, “If you say in Latvia that you spend less than 5% [on defense] you might be losing elections.”
The topic of just how much average voters want to give to NATO was a big one at the summit, particularly among European Union parliamentarians with eyes on polls.
Because a boost in defense spending is a particularly tough sell for politicians in Spain given national debt levels, that nation was the sole NATO member to negotiate an exception to the 5% pledge, in part by promising to spend 2% of its GDP on defense by the end of 2025.
In the Netherlands, some $21 billion will need to be freed up to go toward the 5% defense spending, says Anna van Zoest, director of the Netherlands Atlantic Association. “That’s going to have to come from somewhere. So having at least some slight understanding of what’s at stake is the responsibility of all of us.”
This understanding can arise in very practical ways. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, energy prices rose throughout the alliance. It also comes, analysts say, through an appreciation, and a shoring up, of the democracies the alliance is defending through investments in people and infrastructure.
To this end, France is organizing war games to help people respond to societal disruptions like power cuts and massive disinformation campaigns.
Estonia’s foreign minister has said that through investments in national railways alone, his country has “likely already met the target.”
In Canada, officials in the Yukon are investing in, among other things, projects in Indigenous communities that serve the needs of locals “as well as that of the military,” according to a Yukon Arctic Security Advisory Council report.
Other countries are investing in cybersecurity, the protection of commercial undersea cables – which, if severed, could interrupt communications – and even cold storage for the better transport of refrigerated food and medical supplies, particularly during times of conflict.
Stockpiling not just weapons, but also food
In an effort to encourage more cooperation with the civilian sector, NATO’s political leaders are trying to be more transparent – and perhaps a bit more humble, Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Kęstutis Budrys told an audience at the NATO summit.
He recalled trying to loop in businesses to a security problem Lithuania was wrestling with: how to store up food supplies so citizens would have enough to eat for months in the event that Russia, say, cut them off.
In the past, when businesses asked follow-up questions to help puzzle out solutions, the Lithuanian government would tell them that the answers were secret. “‘It’s not for you to know,’ we were saying to businesses. ‘You will get what you need to know when the war starts,’” Mr. Budrys said.
But the government learned a lot by opening up, he added. “The first thing [farmers and businesses] said was, ‘Look, it doesn’t work like this. You don’t understand how the business functions.’”
Now, he says, his country will be more resilient in the face of potential adversarial pressure.
Resilience – and how to grow it – came up a lot during the NATO summit, including among military officers.
“It’s not only giving the war to the military and saying, ‘Fight wars,’” said Adm. Pierre Vandier, who heads NATO’s Allied Command Transformation.
The shift involves not just thinking of defense as more than “guns and military means,” but also actively engaging citizens, such as in stockpiling supplies, said Linas Kojala, CEO of the Geopolitics and Security Studies Center, a Lithuanian think tank.
Yet how to boost readiness and societal resilience without scaremongering can be tricky, NATO officials acknowledge, particularly when geography plays a role.
“Hearing you talk about preparedness in Lithuania, it’s a totally foreign concept to me because I’m American and we are surrounded by two massive oceans,” said Ms. Rizzo of the Atlantic Council.
Just having conversations like these contribute to a shared sense of unity and purpose among allies, NATO officials say.
It’s not about handing Mr. Trump a win, Mr. Kojala argued. “No. It’s for our own sake – for our security.”
This unity gives the alliance not only the capability to fight wars, he added, but the credibility and broadened mandate it needs to forestall them.
As NATO allies broaden their definition of defense spending, we’ll look later this week at how one sub-Arctic corner of Canada is aiming to bolster security using this new mind-set.
