There’s No Excuse for NATO Allies Not Meeting That 2 Percent Threshold

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

With the NATO summit wrapping up, President Trump continues to complain, accurately, that some allies like Canada are not spending 2 percent of their GDP on national defense, as the alliance requests of its members.

There’s really no good excuse for any member nation failing to hit that 2 percent threshold. In the most current report from NATO, the United States spends 3.42 percent, Bulgaria spends 3.25 percent, Greece spends 2.28 percent, the U.K. and Estonia both spend 2.14 percent, Lituania’s at 2.03 percent, Latvia’s at 2.01 percent, and Poland hit 2 percent on the dot. A bunch of NATO members are just below the threshold — Turkey’s at 1.89 percent, France is at 1.84, and Norway is at 1.8 percent.

Fifteen NATO members are below 1.8 percent; Canada is at 1.31 percent. The real stragglers are Belgium (.93 percent), Spain (.92 percent), and Luxembourg (.56 percent). The Luxembourg Army “has a strength of approximately 430 professional soldiers,” and a population of about 600,000 people.

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