NATO chief urges members to spend far more on military

LONDON — The chief of NATO on Monday called on the alliance to make a “quantum leap in our collective defense,” committing to increases in military spending that far outstrip what Britain and most other members have yet pledged.

Speaking in London, Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary-general, laid bare the budget pressures that will face Britain and its European neighbors as they confront the aggression of Russia and the retrenchment of the United States.

Rutte, a former prime minister of the Netherlands, is pushing for members to commit to spending 5% of their gross domestic product on military and defense-related activities, a target promoted by President Donald Trump, who complains that the alliance has long unfairly burdened the United States.

Rutte hopes to enshrine the new benchmark at a NATO summit in The Hague on June 24 and 25. But he has yet to set a timeline for when members would be required to meet it — and the goal still seems elusive.

Britain has pledged to increase military spending to 2.5% of gross domestic product by 2027, paid for by diverting funds from overseas aid. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has set a goal of 3% within a decade, although he has refused to give a more specific date without knowing where the money will come from.

Ramping up to 5%, analysts say, would necessitate politically painful trade-offs for Britain, which is already dealing with straitened public finances. Britain currently spends 2.3% of its economic output on defense, more than France or Germany but less than the United States, at about 3.4%.

“It’s not up to me to decide how countries pay the bill,” Rutte said to an audience at Chatham House, a research organization in London. He said that Britain could opt not to meet the 5% target and, “you could still have the National Health Service” and other public services.

“But you better learn to speak Russian,” Rutte warned.

Without a more credible military deterrent, he said, Russia could mount an effective offensive against NATO in five years. Russia, Rutte noted, was producing ammunition at four times the rate of NATO, although its stockpiles are growing more slowly because it is using so much in its war on Ukraine.

Citing Russia’s devastating air attacks on Kyiv and other cities, Rutte called on Britain and other members to increase production of air and missile defense systems by 400%. He also said they needed to produce thousands more tanks and armored vehicles, and millions of additional artillery shells.

Rutte, who met earlier with Starmer, declined to say whether they discussed the spending target, although he lavished praise on the Labour government for its strategic defense review, published last week, which recommended ambitious investments in weaponry and military infrastructure.

Earlier Monday, Rutte and Britain’s defense secretary, John Healey, toured a factory in Sheffield, in northern England, which produces steel parts used in nuclear-grade components for British navy submarines.

Starmer has announced plans to build up to 12 new attack submarines and invest billions of pounds in other weaponry. Britain will procure up to 7,000 long-range weapons and invest money to safeguard critical underwater infrastructure as well as produce drones, which have proved lethal in the war in Ukraine.

Starmer described the threat facing Britain “as more serious, more immediate and more unpredictable than at any time since the Cold War.” He has positioned Britain as a bridge between Europe and the United States.

But despite Starmer’s ominous language, the prime minister is still hamstrung by tight public finances and the government’s need to bolster spending for domestic priorities such as the National Health Service.

Preparing a spending review to be announced this week, the chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, faced pressure from other Cabinet ministers and municipal officials, who are complaining about inadequate investments in housing, law enforcement and capital projects for London.

Rutte said he sympathized with the trade-offs that the British government needed to make, noting that it could either raise taxes, cut spending on other programs or accept an increase in the budget deficit.

The Netherlands spends about 2.05% of its GDP on defense, up from 1.3% when Rutte became prime minister. Some of that increase coincided with Rutte’s interest in the top NATO job.

Rutte showed his political instincts, crediting Trump with “breaking the deadlock” with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, by getting him to begin ceasefire negotiations with Ukraine. Rutte played down suggestions that NATO would rescind an offer to Ukraine to join the alliance because of pressure from Trump.

But he said the NATO summit would focus on other issues, so Ukraine’s future membership would not figure prominently.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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