NATO countries bordering Russia want to oblige Alliance members to radically increase defense budgets.
Estonia’s initiative to increase defense spending is supported countries on NATO's eastern flank that share common borders with Russia. The Allies believe that it is necessary to more actively prepare for a possible attack by the aggressor country in the future.
The Times writes about this.
The publication notes that the initiative will gain momentum after the July NATO summit in Washington. Russia's neighbors believe that current defense budgets do not meet the real threats facing the global West. Therefore, they plan to make diplomatic efforts to get other members of the Alliance to agree to raise their national military spending targets.
According to the publication, several NATO member states are proposing to increase defense budgets to at least 3% of GDP, taking into account the war in Ukraine and possible Russian aggression against the Alliance in the future.
However, according to journalists, the initiative is likely to face strong resistance from Germany, France and other states, which already face political risks in trying to overcome the current two percent defense budget threshold.
Countries that support the initiative to increase military spending believe that other states may join the proposal, given the prospect of Donald Trump returning to the presidency of the United States. And the Alliance itself will further stimulate them when, later this year, it reminds some member countries of the need to adhere to the collective defense plans approved at the meeting in Vilnius last year.
According to the Estonian Deputy Secretary of State for Defense Policy Tuuli Duneton, all members of the Alliance should raise the bar for defense spending to at least 2.5% or 3% of GDP. At the same time, she acknowledged that convincing individual allies would be difficult, and negotiations could drag on for a year.
According to unconfirmed information, at least four states are ready to support Estonia’s initiative. But the authors of the article note that a wide discussion of the initiative is still premature, especially given the difficult budget negotiations in Germany and the soon formation of the next government in France, the composition of which remains uncertain.
23 of 32 NATO member countries are expected to reach a defense spending level of 2% of GDP this year. However, some NATO diplomats recall that during the Cold War in the 60s of the last century, military spending reached 7%.
Already now Poland spends more than 4% of GDP on defense, and all the Baltic countries – significantly more than 3%. At the same time, some politicians in Estonia and Lithuania are calling for defense spending to be set at 5%.
Recall that, according to experts, the war meets Putin’s political interests, so he will definitely attack some European state, regardless of the situation in Ukraine, and will fight until the end of his life.
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