ANALYSIS: NATO targets 5% of GDP for defense, a decade-long gamble

Introduction: the number that redefines the Atlantic Alliance

A year after The Hague, Ankara confirms the trajectory

At the Ankara summit, held on July 7 and 8, 2026, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte gave an update on the commitment made a year earlier, in 2025, at the The Hague summit: raising member states' defense and security spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), this target breaks down into two precise components — 3.5% of GDP for so-called "traditional" defense spending, based on NATO's agreed defense-spending definition, and an additional 1.5% for investments "related to defense and security in the broader sense," including protection of critical infrastructure, civil resilience and strengthening defense industrial bases.

In Ankara, Rutte gave a first tally of this still-young trajectory: "Just one year into a 10-year project, we see that European Allies and Canada are already investing around 4% of their GDP in defence and security." In other words, just one year after setting this decade-long target, European allies and Canada have reportedly already reached around 4% of their GDP — a pace the secretary general himself calls "impressive."

258 billion dollars in additional investment

According to remarks by Rutte relayed by several outlets, including an official NATO video, European allies and Canada spent nearly 20% more on traditional defense in 2025 compared with the previous year. Combining 2025 and 2026, roughly 258 billion dollars in additional investment would have been injected into European and Canadian defense budgets. This figure, stated directly by the secretary general, illustrates the scale of the budgetary shift the Alliance has undertaken since returning to a policy of burden shifting — moving the financial load onto European partners.

This shift has not come without internal friction. The Ankara final declaration states that these investments "strengthen the industrial base and resilience" of the Alliance, while stressing the need to "turn money into capabilities." Spending more guarantees nothing if the money does not translate into ammunition delivered, radars installed, soldiers trained. That is precisely what Rutte promised in Ankara: concrete contracts, not just columns of percentages.

A target of 5% of GDP, stated without flinching by 32 heads of state, would have seemed unrealistic ten years ago. This is no longer summit rhetoric — it has become the new budgetary normal for a continent that has belatedly understood peace is negotiated not only across a table, but also inside weapons factories.

Where the 5% figure comes from: the making of a decade-long target

American pressure behind the target

The 5% of GDP figure did not come out of nowhere. According to CNBC, this target was set at the The Hague summit in June 2025, under explicit pressure from the United States — pressure that President Donald Trump has repeatedly applied since returning to the White House, long criticizing European countries for underinvesting in their own defense while Washington shouldered the bulk of NATO's burden. This figure marks a dramatic jump from the previous 2% of GDP target, in place since the 2014 Wales summit, a target many member states had never actually reached.

The Hague declaration had framed the commitment this way, according to CSIS: "All commit to 5% of GDP on core defense requirements as well as defense spending by 2035, ensure our common and collective obligations." The text also stressed the need for each member state to submit credible, progressive annual plans to reach this target, a transparency requirement that addressed concerns raised by several capitals, notably Spain, regularly cited as one of the countries most reluctant to accept such a high target.

A compromise to appease the most reluctant countries

Splitting the figure into two blocks — 3.5% for pure defense and 1.5% for broader security — is no minor technical detail. It made it possible to bring on board countries that, without this flexibility, would have struggled to politically justify such a sharp jump in traditional military spending to their own publics. By folding cybersecurity, critical infrastructure protection and civil resilience into the second component, NATO broadened the definition of what counts as "security spending," making the target more achievable on paper.

This flexibility has a flip side, though: it opens the door to endless debate over what should or should not be counted within that famous 1.5%. According to the Atlantic Council, the Ankara summit was meant to "define eligible categories" under this new defense- and security-related spending framework, and determine how these expenditures would be reported consistently across all 32 member states — a collective accounting exercise that, at this stage, remains largely unfinished.

There is a certain political elegance in this two-speed compromise: giving every member state an accounting off-ramp while still splashing an impressive number across the front pages. But political elegance has never produced a single tank. At some point, someone will actually have to count the real euros spent on real military capabilities.

The total bill: 1.9 trillion dollars a year, a staggering sum

What the 5% target really represents

To grasp the scale of this commitment, look at the concrete projections. According to an analysis published by Ops Con, reaching the 5% of GDP target for the entire Alliance would require roughly 1.9 trillion dollars in additional defense spending per year by 2035, compared with current spending levels. This is a figure that dwarfs most national budgets, and it explains why analysts insist: "execution, not the target, is the real story at Ankara."

This colossal sum illustrates the structural difficulty of the target set at The Hague and confirmed at Ankara. Signing a declaration does not make 1.9 trillion dollars magically appear in defense ministry coffers. Every country must find these funds within national budgets already under strain, often in direct competition with social spending, health care or education — a political dilemma every democratic government must face before its own voters.

Wildly uneven national trajectories

Not all member states start from the same point. Some, like Poland or the Baltic states, already spend well above the Alliance average, driven by their geographic proximity to Russia and an acute awareness of the threat. Others, further from the front line or historically less militarized, need a spectacular budgetary catch-up to have any hope of approaching 5% by 2035. This unevenness risks creating, over time, a multi-speed Alliance, where some countries carry a disproportionate burden compared with others.

The political risk is real: if the gap between budgetary front-runners and laggards widens too much, the unity on display in summit declarations could crack well before the 2035 deadline. This is a problem NATO has already lived through with the old 2% target, never universally met despite decades of renewed commitments.

Ten years is both long and terribly short when it comes to military budgets. Long, because entire governments will change several times before 2035. Short, because rebuilding a defense industrial base after decades of underinvestment cannot happen in a few years. NATO has set an ambitious course. It has not yet proven it can hold the wheel for the whole crossing.

Ankara's concrete contracts: when the number becomes steel

50 billion dollars in new purchases

The Ankara summit did not just produce abstract percentages — it also generated concrete arms contracts. According to NATO's official declaration, allies announced "more than 50 billion dollars in new purchases" at the Defense Industry Forum held on the summit's sidelines. Among the deals signed: eleven countries will buy airborne radar detection systems from Swedish manufacturer Saab for roughly 5 billion dollars, replacing an aging American Boeing model. Denmark, Finland, Germany and Norway will purchase up to five Triton surveillance aircraft from Northrop Grumman for 2.7 billion dollars, while seven countries will acquire Airbus A400M military transport aircraft under a 4.3 billion dollar contract.

These contracts, detailed by several outlets including upday News, were signed in a particular climate: the summit opened the day after a deadly attack on Kyiv, a brutal reminder of the strategic urgency behind these numbers. It is not calendar coincidence that lends these contracts legitimacy — it is the war itself that makes them necessary.

An industrial partnership that redraws internal alliances

The choice to replace an American Boeing model with a Swedish Saab solution deserves attention. It reflects a growing appetite among several European allies to diversify their military supply sources rather than depend exclusively on the American defense industry — a trend sharpened by repeated political tensions between Donald Trump and certain European leaders since his return to power. European strategic autonomy is not decreed in a communiqué — it is built contract by contract, plane by plane.

At the same time, transatlantic partnerships remain very much alive: agreements on AMRAAM missiles, pairing American manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin with European partners including Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden, show that NATO is seeking balance rather than a clean industrial break with Washington.

Watching European countries buy Swedish instead of American is not a minor commercial detail. It is a quiet political signal, sent without a single official word of reproach, yet perfectly legible to anyone who knows how to read between the lines of arms contracts. Europe is slowly learning not to put all its strategic eggs in the Atlantic basket.

The direct link to Ukraine: spending more to hold out longer

A target that also serves Ukrainian resistance

The 5% of GDP target cannot be separated from the context that produced it: the war waged by Russia against Ukraine since February 2022. The Ankara Declaration states this without ambiguity: European defense investments aim to "counter the long-term threat that Russia poses to Euro-Atlantic security and stability." Every additional percentage point of GDP spent on defense potentially translates into more ammunition produced, more air defense systems built — capabilities that directly benefit Ukraine's war effort through existing transfer mechanisms.

The Hague summit had already agreed that contributions to Ukraine's defense and defense industry could be counted toward member states' national defense spending — a decision that structurally encourages allies to support Kyiv while meeting their own budgetary targets at the same time. This is a rare convergence of interests: helping Ukraine and rearming yourself become, in NATO's ledgers, one and the same expense.

The paradox of a European loan that excludes some beneficiaries

This convergence has limits, however. According to the Atlantic Council, the European Union's 90 billion euro support loan largely excludes the defense industries of countries that are not members of the European Economic Area — a technical constraint that complicates, for example, the full participation of the United Kingdom in certain parts of this financing, despite its historically leading role in military support for Ukraine. European institutional borders have not always kept pace with the real needs on the Ukrainian ground.

This kind of bureaucratic friction is a reminder that, even at a moment of mobilization as broad as the one on display in Ankara, the Western institutional architecture remains complex, sometimes counterproductive, and never entirely fluid between the European Union, NATO and partner countries that do not belong to both organizations at once.

We would like Western solidarity to function as one coherent organism. The reality is more prosaic: European regulations that exclude certain partners, accounting definitions that shift from one summit to the next, overlaps between NATO and the European Union that slow everything down. Putin, for his part, is not waiting for these administrative questions to get sorted out.

Critics and skeptics: not everyone is applauding

Fears of excessive militarization of national budgets

The 5% of GDP target is far from unanimous, even within NATO member states themselves. Critical voices, notably in certain opposition parties and social-policy think tanks, worry about a budgetary shift that would favor defense at the expense of other public priorities — health care, education, the energy transition. This debate, far from marginal, runs through most European national parliaments as governments try to turn the Ankara commitment into actual finance laws.

The challenge is especially acute for countries whose public debt is already high. Finding additional fiscal room equivalent to several points of GDP, year after year, for an entire decade, represents a discipline rarely seen in relative peacetime on European soil itself. The real test of this target will not play out at NATO summits, but in national parliamentary debates over finance laws for the next ten years.

Spain, a symbol of persistent resistance

According to CNBC, Spain is among the countries that have voiced the most reluctance toward this ambitious target, citing internal budgetary constraints and a complicated domestic political context. This resistance, documented as early as the 2025 The Hague summit, has not disappeared in Ankara. It reflects an ongoing tension within the Alliance between countries on NATO's eastern flank, directly exposed to the Russian threat and thus more inclined toward rapid budget increases, and certain southern or western European countries, geographically farther from the front and historically more attached to their social models.

This internal geographic divide could, over time, become one of NATO's biggest structural challenges in pursuing a uniform budgetary target. An Alliance of 32 countries never fully shares the same perception of danger — and it is precisely that difference in perception that complicates every collective budget negotiation.

I understand Spanish, Portuguese or Italian reluctance in the face of such a heavy figure. But I reject the argument that defense and social welfare are necessarily competing priorities. A continent that cannot defend itself cannot, in the end, protect its hospitals or its schools either. Security is not a luxury added afterward — it is the condition that allows everything else to exist.

Trump, the West and the new transatlantic budgetary deal

A win that belongs to Washington, whether we like it or not

On a strictly geopolitical and budgetary level, one has to acknowledge an uncomfortable reality for part of Western opinion: it was indeed the pressure applied by Donald Trump since his return to the White House that accelerated this 5% of GDP target, dismissed as unrealistic by many European diplomats just a few years ago. On this specific file — European rearmament against Russia — the American president's sometimes blunt insistence produced concrete results that years of more polished diplomacy had failed to achieve.

This should not prevent us from naming, at the same time, the shadows of the Trump presidency on the American domestic front — the well-documented domestic political controversies accompanying his second term remain distinct from his foreign policy toward NATO. One can acknowledge the effectiveness of geopolitical pressure without whitewashing the excesses of a domestic policy criticized even within Republican ranks. These are two separate files, and they deserve to be judged separately.

A stronger Europe is good news, even if the road is uncomfortable

Beyond political posturing, the concrete outcome remains favorable to European security: an Alliance that invests more in its own defense is better prepared to deter future aggression, whether from Russia, but also potentially from threats linked to China, Iran or North Korea, now explicitly identified as major strategic risks to the Western order. A West that invests in its own strength is a West that negotiates from a position of power, not weakness.

This may be the real legacy of the 5% target: forcing Europe out of a comfortable security dependence on the United States, built since the end of the Second World War, to finally assume a share of responsibility proportional to its actual economic weight on the world stage.

There is something ironic and a bit bitter about the fact that it took a president as unpredictable as Trump to push Europe into finally paying its fair share for its own defense. But history does not always remember the motives of its actors — it remembers the results. And the result, here, is a more armed Europe facing a Russia that, for its part, is not disarming.

The comparison that worries: China, Iran, North Korea and the global equation

A rearmament that isn't only aimed at Moscow

While the war in Ukraine remains the obvious trigger for this 5% of GDP target, the Ankara Declaration explicitly broadens the spectrum of threats targeted. The text refers to "strategic competition, persistent instability, hybrid threats and recurring shocks" that define the Alliance's broader security environment. The explicit mention of Iran, told by the text to "never possess a nuclear weapon" and called on to "fully respect freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz," confirms that NATO now thinks about its defense posture well beyond the European theater alone.

China and North Korea, though less central in the official Ankara declaration text, nonetheless weigh on the strategic calculations underlying this rearmament target. A better-armed European continent facing Russia becomes, by extension, a more credible partner for containing China's growing influence and deterring any opportunistic temptation from Beijing or Pyongyang while Western attention remains focused on Eastern Europe.

A 360-degree defense doctrine

The Ankara Declaration explicitly revives the concept of a "360-degree approach to deterrence and defense," language that reflects the Alliance's determination to stop thinking about its security in separate geographic silos. Investing in air defense, cyber capabilities, long-range precision strike systems or military artificial intelligence, as the official text mentions through the adoption of "powerful AI models" and the development of an "interoperable transatlantic combat cloud," responds to threats that recognize no fixed regional boundaries.

Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are not four separate files for NATO strategists — they are four facets of the same systemic risk, that of a rules-based international order these four powers contest to varying degrees. It is this global reading that justifies, in the eyes of Western strategists, such a massive and sustained budgetary effort over time.

We often oversimplify this war by reducing it to a duel between Ukraine and Russia. That is a strategic misreading. What is at stake in Ankara also concerns Taiwan, the Korean peninsula and the Strait of Hormuz — because every sign of Western weakness in Europe emboldens the ambitions of Beijing, Pyongyang and Tehran a little more.

Conclusion: a decade-long target, a bet on democratic staying power

The real test starts now, not in Ankara

The Ankara summit will go down in the record books as the moment NATO confirmed, a year after The Hague, its trajectory toward 5% of GDP devoted to defense by 2035. With roughly 4% already reached, according to Mark Rutte's own words, the momentum appears real and not purely rhetorical. But a decade-long target is judged over ten years, not on one year of initial good results, often the easiest to achieve in any long-term budgetary trajectory.

The 1.9 trillion dollars in additional annual spending needed to fully reach this target represents a challenge of a scale rarely seen in relative peacetime on the European continent. Every election, every change of government, every national budget crisis could slow down or speed up this trajectory, making any prediction at this stage largely speculative.

What history will judge by the 2035 deadline

What is certain is that the context that motivated this target — Russia's war against Ukraine, rising tensions with China, persistent instability in the Middle East — will likely not disappear by 2035. The Atlantic Alliance has entered a long-term bet: that Western democracy, despite its slowness and internal divisions, can maintain collective budgetary discipline against adversaries who face no such electoral constraints. This is a risky bet. It is also, for now, the only bet on the table.

Ten years is how long it will take to know whether Ankara was a real turning point or just a line in the diplomatic archives. I choose to bet on the former, not out of naive optimism, but because the alternative — a West that backs down before Putin, Beijing or Tehran — is simply not a world I want to live in.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

Editorial position

This analysis takes a clear editorial line: support for a strong and united West against the documented threats posed by Vladimir Putin's Russia, but also China, Iran and North Korea. On the specific matter of European rearmament, Donald Trump's policy is treated as a factor that produced geopolitical outcomes favorable to the Alliance, without erasing the documented controversies of his American domestic policy, addressed separately and critically where relevant. This position reflects the columnist-analyst's own judgment.

Methodology and sources

All facts, figures and quotes come from verified sources: the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the official Ankara summit declaration published by NATO, remarks by Secretary General Mark Rutte reported by several outlets, CNBC, EURACTIV, the Atlantic Council, Forbes and upday News. No figure has been invented or extrapolated beyond what these converging sources report.

Nature of this analysis and factual limits

This text is a geopolitical and budgetary analysis, not neutral reporting in the strict sense. One factual limit should be noted: the long-term projected figures, notably the 1.9 trillion dollars per year by 2035, rest on analyst extrapolations rather than binding consolidated official NATO figures, since the organization does not publish a single consolidated projection for that horizon.

Sources

Primary sources

Overview of the 2026 NATO summit in Ankara — NATO

NATO Secretary General previews the Ankara summit, highlights progress on defense spending — NATO, July 6, 2026

What NATO defense spending looks like heading into the Ankara summit — CSIS, July 6, 2026

NATO allies already spend 4% of GDP on defense, Rutte says — EURACTIV, July 6, 2026

Secondary sources

NATO allies agree to higher 5% defense spending target — CNBC, June 25, 2025

NATO's Ankara summit and building the 5% for the defense industry — Ops Con, July 5, 2026

What happened at the 2026 NATO summit in Turkey — Forbes, July 9, 2026

From burden-sharing to strategic delivery: NATO and Turkey's priorities ahead of the Ankara summit — Atlantic Council