Nato allies must raise hard military spending to more than 3.5% of GDP and soon, US Senate hears

The United States’ Nato allies must commit more than 3.5 per cent to hard military spending and do so in less than seven years, witnesses told US senators on Wednesday, foreshadowing what could be a contentious discussion at the security group’s leaders summit next week.

In recent weeks, Mark Rutte, the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, has said he expects member states at the summit in The Hague to agree to spend 5 per cent of their gross domestic product on defence by 2032 – but that 1.5 per cent could be applied to defence-related investments like cybersecurity and infrastructure rather than weapons and military operations.

In the lead-up to the summit, however, some US lawmakers and analysts are pushing for the hard-power portion to be higher.

Alina Polyakova, president of the Centre for European Policy Analysis think tank, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that she would “like to see European allies commit to 5 per cent on core defence spending, not the 3.5-1.5 split”.

Peter Rough, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Centre on Europe and Eurasia, said the two categories needed to be clearly defined so that expenses like “climate spending” did not count toward any expenditures.

Rough and Polyakova both argued that the deadline for achieving the commitment should be shorter than the seven years proposed by Rutte, with Rough explicitly calling for a five-year target.

“Simply put, the intelligence assessments all suggest that there is an urgent threat and that Russia is rebuilding,” Rough said.