SETA report unpacks NATO's tormented history of burden sharing

A Turkish institute publishing right before Ankara

Just days before the NATO summit in Ankara, set for July 7-8, 2026, the Turkish research institute SETA (Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research) published a dense report tracing, across several decades, the turbulent history of financial burden sharing within the Atlantic Alliance. The document is soberly titled "Defense Spending Debates within NATO: The Transformation of Transatlantic Security and Burden Sharing," and it lands at a pivotal moment when the question of who pays what, and how much, is once again the flashpoint of diplomatic tension between allies.

This is no accident of timing. The report explicitly notes that the Ankara summit carries particular significance, both as a reaffirmation of Turkey's indispensable role within the Alliance and as an opportunity to reshape the defense spending debate in light of the new global security environment.

Why this report is worth reading in full

What SETA manages to do is connect decades of transatlantic tension to the most radical budgetary decision NATO has ever made: the commitment made in June 2025 at the Hague summit to raise defense and security spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. That figure, which would have seemed unrealistic a decade ago, is now the official standard toward which all 32 member countries must converge, with the exception of Spain, which secured a partial exemption.

The report stresses that the decisions coming out of the Ankara summit will be decisive for the strength of NATO's collective defense capability and for the durability of the transatlantic bond. That is no casual statement coming from an institute based in the summit's host country.

The 2% pact born in Cardiff in 2014

To understand how far the road has come, you have to go back to the Wales summit in 2014, where Allies set a clear numerical target for the first time: spending at least 2% of national GDP on defense. At the time, that commitment was a direct response to Russia's annexation of Crimea, a geopolitical shock that brutally reminded Europe that peace on the continent could not be taken for granted forever.

Yet ten years later, only 23 of NATO's 32 members had actually reached that 2% threshold, according to figures cited by several defense analysts. This slow execution illustrates a structural problem the SETA report documents in detail: NATO's collective commitments have historically suffered from a chronic implementation deficit, with each country interpreting the urgency of the threat in its own way.

The shock of the 2022 invasion and The Hague acceleration

It took Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 to truly force a paradigm shift. The report recalls that this aggression triggered an unprecedented surge in European defense budgets, with real growth of 11% as early as 2023, followed by continued acceleration in the years since.

It was against this backdrop that the Hague summit, held on June 24-25, 2025, locked in the now-famous target of 5% of GDP by 2035, split between 3.5% for "pure" defense spending (equipment, personnel, operations) and up to 1.5% for broader security spending, including cyber defense and critical infrastructure.

Trump and the logic of fair burden sharing

The SETA report devotes an entire section to the transformation of American strategic logic toward the transatlantic relationship. The Trump administration introduced a qualitatively different kind of burden-sharing pressure than previous administrations, more explicitly tying the credibility of the American commitment to allies meeting Washington's political expectations.

On this specific point, I believe Trump was right to shake up decades of European budgetary comfort. The United States was, until recently, still shouldering nearly two-thirds of NATO's total defense spending, an imbalance that was no longer politically sustainable in Washington, regardless of which party held power.

A Europe responding with accelerated rearmament

Faced with this pressure, European allies and Canada responded with what the report describes as a rearmament push of historically unprecedented speed. In 2025 alone, European and Canadian defense spending rose by more than $90 billion, a nearly 20% increase over the previous year, bringing the combined total to over $571 billion.

Norway even became, for the first time in NATO's history, the European member country spending the most per capita on defense, surpassing the United States on that specific measure, a powerful symbol of this shift.

Spain, Hungary, and open refusal

The SETA report, like several concurring analyses published ahead of the Ankara summit, points a finger at the countries dragging their feet. Spain remains the most vocal critic of the 5% target, having secured a formal exemption at the Hague summit while only very recently reaching the 2% threshold. According to a POLITICO report cited in pre-summit analyses, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, and even the United Kingdom have made insufficient progress since the 2025 summit.

This lag among certain European allies, several of whom maintain ambiguous ties with Moscow or openly distrust European integration, illustrates a persistent fracture within the Western camp itself, at a moment when a façade of unity masks deep divergences over the perceived Russian threat.

The UK, a telling case of creative accounting

The British case is particularly instructive: London claims it will reach 4.1% of GDP by 2027 under new accounting definitions that include its intelligence services' activities, a method that allows for a flattering trajectory without necessarily increasing traditional military spending at the same pace. This practice, documented by several independent defense analysts, fuels legitimate skepticism about the real solidity of the figures put forward by certain European governments.

The SETA report even describes the new spending targets as "vague, flexible, and soft," a sharp critique underscoring the absence of any binding enforcement mechanism for failing to meet the commitments made at The Hague.

An entire industrial forum devoted to production

According to observers cited in pre-summit analyses, the Ankara summit will be less focused on sweeping strategic declarations than on very concrete questions of budgetary and industrial execution. A full day, July 7, will be devoted to a defense industry forum, a sign that Allies want to turn financial commitments into tangible military capability rather than abstract percentages on an official document.

Secretary General Mark Rutte summed up this priority by identifying three focus areas for the summit: transforming defense investment, defense industry innovation, and sustaining support for Ukraine, three pillars that will structure the discussions in Ankara.

Capability delivery, the Alliance's new watchword

NATO observers expect three themes to dominate the summit: adapting the Alliance toward a collective defense posture against peer-level competitors, the actual delivery of military capabilities at the pace the current security environment demands, and technological and industrial resilience. This last point directly echoes concerns raised by several experts about the persistent gap between approved budgets and equipment actually delivered on the ground.

This growing obsession with execution, rather than with the budget pledge alone, marks a welcome maturing of the debate within NATO, which has too often, in the past, confused announcing a number with actually solving a military problem.

A collective guarantee turned politically conditional

The SETA report identifies a shift it considers structurally troubling: the transformation of American logic toward a conditional framing of Article 5, the collective defense clause that has been NATO's cornerstone since its founding in 1949. When the credibility of that guarantee becomes a function of allies meeting Washington's political expectations rather than an independent treaty obligation, the deterrence architecture that has protected Europe for decades enters a zone of structural ambiguity, in the report's own words.

This analysis is not pure theoretical speculation: it is concretely reflected in the fact that several allies are now planning their force structures and procurement cycles with the possibility of a reduced or conditional American commitment in mind, a reality that would have seemed unthinkable barely a decade ago.

The strategic cost of a Europe that must learn to defend itself alone

This shift is forcing Europeans to accelerate independent initiatives, from the European Union's Permanent Structured Cooperation to the European Defence Fund, alongside proposals for a formal European pillar within NATO itself. Under Secretary of War Elbridge Colby also called in February 2026 for a "NATO 3.0" in which Europeans would take on far greater responsibility, a direction since confirmed by several Pentagon announcements about resizing the American military presence in Europe.

This dynamic, however uncomfortable for some European allies accustomed to the American umbrella, forces a welcome clarification of actual responsibilities within the Alliance, even if the cost, in terms of transatlantic tension, should not be underestimated.

Tens of billions already committed since 2022

The report notes that NATO members have sent tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion began in February 2022. In April 2026, Allies committed an additional $60 billion in military aid to Kyiv, a figure that illustrates the consistency of Western support despite the length of the conflict.

A notable detail highlighted by several analysts: contributions to Ukraine's war effort are now explicitly counted toward national defense spending under NATO's criteria, which indirectly encourages allies to maintain or even increase their support for Kyiv in order to meet their budget targets.

Zelensky expected in Ankara, a strong political signal

Secretary General Mark Rutte confirmed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will attend the two-day Ankara summit, reaffirming that NATO's security and Ukraine's are now inseparably linked. This presence, far from symbolic, will allow direct discussions within the NATO-Ukraine Council and the Ukraine Defense Contact Group on the concrete terms of future support.

This continuity of support for Kyiv, despite internal budget tensions within the Alliance, shows that Western solidarity with Ukraine remains, for now, a red line that even the most reluctant governments on defense spending dare not publicly cross.

DIANA and efforts to speed up defense innovation

Beyond the raw numbers, the summit will also address progress on DIANA, the North Atlantic defense innovation accelerator, which in April awarded a research and development contract to a British technology company specializing in underwater robotics. The stated goal is to reduce the administrative barriers that traditionally slow the adoption of new military technologies within national defense establishments.

This innovation dimension, often overshadowed by the more dramatic debates over GDP percentages, is nonetheless just as decisive for long-term military competitiveness against adversaries like Russia or China, which are investing massively in breakthrough technologies.

The persistent gap between budget pledges and industrial delivery

The SETA report, like other analyses published the same week, highlights a worrying gap between the ambition allied governments proclaim and what is actually achievable in their capitals, given persistent bureaucracy, risk aversion, and a lack of proper delegation within ministries to allow spending with sufficient agility.

This bureaucratic slowness, if not corrected quickly, risks turning the historic commitments made at The Hague into mere broken promises, a worst-case scenario the Ankara summit must absolutely avoid if it wants to preserve the Alliance's credibility against Moscow.

A report that refuses complacency

The great merit of the SETA report is that it refuses to be complacent about the real state of burden sharing within NATO. By methodically tracing the history of commitments made from Cardiff in 2014 to The Hague in 2025, it reminds us that grand solemn declarations only have value if they translate into rigorous budgetary and industrial execution, year after year, with no exceptions or convenient exemptions.

The Ankara summit, on July 7-8, 2026, will be a decisive test in this regard: either the Allies prove they can turn the 5% commitment into concrete military capabilities delivered within reasonable timeframes, or they confirm the report's fears about targets that are "vague, flexible, and soft" and will not survive the first serious crisis.

The collective responsibility of a West that can no longer afford improvisation

Facing a Russia that continues its aggression in Ukraine, an increasingly assertive China, and an increasingly unstable global security environment, the West can no longer afford the luxury of the budgetary improvisation that characterized past decades. The SETA report, by coldly documenting this history of promises too often broken, provides a valuable tool for assessing whether Ankara will finally mark the moment the Atlantic Alliance stops merely promising and starts truly delivering.

It is this transition from words to action that will ultimately determine whether NATO remains the credible security guarantee it has been for more than seven decades, or whether it slowly slides into a declarative shell whose real strength no longer matches its stated ambitions.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

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I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

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