When President Trump demanded months ago that NATO allies spend 5 percent of their national income on defense, leaders across Europe said it couldn’t be done.
Now those countries have found a way to meet his call — with a bit of creative accounting.
Some NATO countries have in principle backed a new plan to broaden NATO spending beyond traditional items such as troops and weapons. The plan calls for a target of military spending at 3.5 percent of their gross domestic product, plus another 1.5 percent for newer, nontraditional “defense-related” spending by 2032, officials said.
The latter could include building or improving rail lines and bridges to withstand the weight of military convoys, strengthening cybersecurity or developing advanced technology for weaponry and communications. Some member nations are open to shouldering more of their collective costs, alarmed by Mr. Trump’s threats to weaken American support for European security if they don’t.
“We have to make sure that we have all the enablers in place, everything related to defense spending in place,” the NATO secretary general, Mark Rutte, said last week after meeting with the alliance’s foreign ministers in Turkey, where countries agreed to the 5 percent plan.
“Sometimes when you cross a bridge in Europe, you hope with your own car that you safely get across it — let alone with a tank,” he added.
Mr. Rutte came up with the approach to meeting the spending goal, according to a NATO country’s foreign minister and a European diplomat. It combines what many experts think: European countries must spend on hard military power to take responsibility for conventional deterrence while meeting Mr. Trump’s demand.
Germany’s newly appointed foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, said in Turkey that his government backs Mr. Rutte’s proposal. His French counterpart, Jean-Noël Barrot, said that a “3 percent to 3.5 percent target is right,” but hinted at backing the broader plan in remarks to reporters.
The new approach reflects allied governments’ efforts to win over Mr. Trump, or at least show him they are making progress on his appeals.
It is also an acknowledgment that NATO members’ current pledge, to spend 2 percent of G.D.P. on the military, is too little to sustain the alliance against the backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the first full-scale land war in Europe since World War II. Some member states have yet to meet even that commitment.
NATO spending is expected to be the focus of an annual summit meeting scheduled for June 24-25 in The Hague, in Mr. Rutte’s native Netherlands. Already, it has stirred considerable debate within the alliance, and officials are trying to reach a consensus on spending goals before the summit begins, said Radmila Shekerinska, NATO’s new deputy secretary general.
While Mr. Trump’s schedule is not finalized, he is expected to attend the summit meeting.
In the latest official figures, 23 of NATO’s 32 member states meet or surpass the current 2 percent threshold. The Trump administration appears to be open to allies broadening how they invest in defense spending, so long as the total reaches 5 percent.
“It is definitely more than just missiles, tanks, and howitzers,” Matthew G. Whitaker, the new American ambassador to NATO, said last week. “But at the same time, it’s got to be defense-related. It’s not a grab-bag for everything.”
At the Lennart Meri security conference in Estonia last weekend, Mr. Whitaker said that the United States would also commit to the same spending goal of 5 percent, though that amount is much larger than for other NATO countries. The United States spends nearly $1 trillion on global military operations.
Increasing the overall spending threshold to 5 percent would bring NATO’s collective defense spending to $2.4 trillion, with the United States still paying more than half, according to a recent estimate by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
In Europe, where 23 states are both members of NATO and the European Union, leaders have considerably bolstered defense and deterrence since Russia invaded of Ukraine. But the new spending commitment would require significant investment from laggards like Italy, Portugal and Spain, and put more pressure on key countries with already high budget deficits, like France and Britain.
Some states, like Baltic nations that border Russia, have already planned to spend at least 5 percent of their gross national product on traditional military costs like personnel, weapons and military operations, including exercises, by the end of the decade. Estonia plans on surpassing that goal in 2026. Poland also aims to reach the goal by next year.
“The target of NATO member countries must be 5 percent in the future,” Estonia’s foreign minister, Margus Tsahkna, said at the meeting last week. “And we are not talking about anything other than real defense spending, which is stipulated in NATO regulations.”
Without allowing spending on infrastructure and technology, however, it is unlikely that most allies could meet the mark.
The Italian government, for example, projects it will reach 2 percent of G.D.P. on defense spending this year, an increase. But Italy does not yet count certain technologies that could be put to military use strictly as defense spending, said Roberto Cingolani, the chief executive of the Italian defense firm Leonardo.
If they were, he predicted the percentage of Italy’s defense expenditures could quickly rise.
Advanced technology, like artificial intelligence and cloud computing, are “becoming the new backbone of defense,” Mr. Cingolani said in a recent interview. “It’s not just bullets — it’s bullets and bytes.”
Experts said Mr. Trump’s demands also created an incentive for Europe to finally break through funding and bureaucratic hurdles to address another vulnerability: upgrading key transit routes for any rapid deployment of troops and weapons.
The war in Ukraine has highlighted Europe’s shortcomings in such logistical preparedness. Tanks and other heavy military equipment have been stopped from crossing borders in Europe where roads and bridges were too weak to support their weight, a study this year by E.U. auditors found.
Military cargo arriving by train from Western Europe to the Baltics, where Soviet-standard-sized rails are still used in some places, must be transferred from one train to another to be delivered to NATO’s eastern flank, said Jannik Hartmann of the German Council on Foreign Relations. And many other rail lines among Germany, the Netherlands and Poland — a key NATO support corridor — are either closed or congested.
“In case of war, we need to need to have sufficient alternative routes that we can take if one falls through,” Mr. Hartmann said, pointing to a rail bridge in Hannover-Ahlem in Germany, a crossroads for European transit that has been used as a route for shipping military equipment to Ukraine.
It is under construction, rerouting trains on long detours that, he said, “costs not only money, but puts lives on the front line at risk.”
Lara Jakes, based in Rome, reports on diplomatic and military efforts by the West to support Ukraine in its war with Russia. She has been a journalist for nearly 30 years.
Steven Erlanger is the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe and is based in Berlin. He has reported from over 120 countries, including Thailand, France, Israel, Germany and the former Soviet Union.
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