Germany’s former Defense Minister, Ursula von der Leyen has become the new President of the European Commission. Amidst the long list of challenges awaiting her, von der Leyen must find a way to mitigate political disputes within the EU and between the U.S. and NATO to consolidate conflicting visions of European defense.
A significant number of Russia’s tactics fall in the space between routine statecraft and direct and open warfare, a space sometimes referred to as the gray zone.
President Hassan Rouhani of Iran marked the one-year anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal—formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—with another blow to the agreement.
Expansion weakens the alliance rather than strengthening it. It’s time to stop NATO expansion.
It’s time we ditch the two percent (or any percent) of GDP metric for allied defense spending and focus on what really matters—capability, capacity, readiness, and interoperability. In the end, it’s not about how much of our allies’ economic output is directed to defense, and this metric does little to incentivize the results we want to see.
Discussion over transatlantic security spending has increasingly focused on whether NATO members are spending 2% of their GDP on defense and the merits of 2% as a metric for assessing burden sharing. In addition to analyzing current NATO metrics, this report examines several alternatives that provide a broader understanding of collective security contributions and could improve the rigor of security spending analysis.
The official 2 percent threshold, while mandated at the 2014 Wales Summit, has long been understood as an unofficial spending target for NATO members. According to 2017 estimates illustrated in the graphic, only four of the 28 NATO member states meet the 2 percent spending level while 15 are expected to meet it by 2024..
NATO breaks defense expenditure into four main categories: equipment, personnel, infrastructure, and other. In addition to the commitment to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense, NATO heads of state pledged at the 2014 Wales Summit to spend 20 percent of their defense budgets on major equipment.
As some allies and partners call for a broader view of the investments that contribute to collective defense, the CSIS study team examined security assistance spending by NATO member states and its select subset of European partners.
