Europe is belatedly responding to President Donald Trump’s call for much increased defense spending on the continent. Trump wants NATO member states to spend 5% of GDP on defense (a higher allotment than the United States, which spent 3.4% of GDP on defense in 2024). While Trump fails to recognize how the NATO defensive alliance benefits America’s prosperity and security, he understands that alliances cannot be sustained without fair burden-sharing.

Unfortunately, the Canadians and too many European NATO nations aren’t moving quickly enough to get their defense budgets where they need to be. They are reluctant to make cuts to their expansive welfare states to allocate more funds to defense. Instead, they are increasingly focused on using gimmicks to claim higher-than-accurate, top-line percentages of GDP defense budgets. Their poor example stands in stark contrast to the leadership of Poland.

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Poland will spend just below 5% of its GDP on defense this year, making it by far the most serious ally in this regard. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are all set to spend significantly above 2% of GDP on defense in 2025. Unfortunately, defense spending remains broadly rotten in the defensive kingdom of NATO. This is an intolerable situation 3 1/2 years after the start of the biggest land war in Europe since 1945, and in the context of Russia’s ambitions beyond Ukraine. It means the U.S. military is forced to carry a continuing burden in the alliance’s defense, spreading U.S. forces too thin in the face of China’s grave threat in the Western Pacific. There are easy rebuttals to those who claim that Europe is now doing its fair share for NATO.

Take, for example, the June 2023 Air Defender 23 warfare exercise simulating a defense of Germany against a massive Russian invasion. Reflecting the new environment of Russia’s militarism on the continent, the U.S. deployed 100 military aircraft to participate in that exercise. France, Germany’s western border neighbor and Europe’s second-largest economy, sent just one aircraft. One. That same exercise also underlined Europe’s extraordinary reliance on the U.S. military for intelligence collection and air-to-air refueling aircraft.

To fix this situation and address Trump’s 5% of GDP defense spending demand, new NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has proposed that NATO states spend at least 3.5% of GDP on defense by 2032 and another 1.5% on defense-related projects such as road and railway infrastructure. But at a press briefing two weeks ago, U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matt Whitaker observed that the 1.5% figure can’t just be “a grab bag for everything that you could possibly imagine.” Whitaker recognizes that the key interest here rests in advancing NATO’s military power. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s imperial expansionism cannot be deterred by summits and dialogue but only by raw combat power that credibly threatens the battlefield annihilation of his armed forces should he instigate a war with NATO.

True, the Trump administration gets it wrong in demanding that European nations increase defense spending but prioritize purchases from U.S. defense firms. This is unfair and will undermine European public support for higher defense spending by minimizing its possible economic benefits. But Whitaker’s broader warning is well placed. A cursory look below the defense budget surface shows that too many NATO allies are using gimmicks to boost their top-line defense budgets. Take the example of America’s closest ally, the United Kingdom.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently announced a defense spending increase to 2.5% of GDP. But looking below the surface, even that modest 2.5% expenditure doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Consider what’s happening with the U.K.’s new and highly foolish agreement to grant sovereignty over the U.K.’s Indian Ocean Diego Garcia air and naval base to Mauritius. The U.K. will pay $137 million a year for the next 99 years, with an undisclosed portion of that expenditure coming from its defense budget. While $137 million might not be a lot when assessed against the U.K.’s $77 billion 2024 defense budget, the broken principle against blurring nondefense expenditures into a defense budget is what matters here.

Or how about the European Union’s largest economy?

Measured by his early foreign policy actions, Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is an improvement from his rather pathetic, appeasement-minded predecessor, Olaf Scholz. In response to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Scholz promised a “Zeitenwende” revolution in German defense policy. This was to entail massive and sustained increases in defense spending to close the book on years of defense spending neglect by Europe’s largest economy. It lasted about a year. Scholz then used accounting tricks such as treating interest payments and his office expenses as defense allotments.

By the same token, where German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius once offered bold commitments to do much more for European security, he then surrendered when his Cabinet colleagues backtracked on defense spending increases. Pistorius instead focused on defending Europe’s authoritarian speech laws. This reflects the evident inability of the German establishment to look in the mirror in assessing the decline in trans-Atlantic relations. Yes, Trump has read too little history and cares too little for the sacrifices of better allies such as Denmark and Estonia, but Germany and every other NATO member state were warned 14 years ago that their defense freeloading would lead to a president such as Trump.

Will Merz wake up to reality?

Since entering office on May 6, Merz has promised significant boosts to defense spending. Last week, he attended a ceremony to mark the presence of Germany’s 45th Panzer Brigade in Lithuania. That unit would be central to any defense of the Baltic states in the event of a Russian invasion. Unfortunately, Merz’s action doesn’t appear to be as wonderful as some analysts suppose.

Referencing Rutte’s 3.5%-1.5% proposal, for example, Merz seems set only to pursue rather than to exceed these figures. As he put it, “These are two figures that we could approach from the perspective of the federal government. They seem reasonable to us, and they also seem achievable, at least within the specified time frame [by] 2032.” This isn’t sufficient from Germany.

After all, as Estonia’s most recent defense intelligence report pointed out, Russian military investments are designed to reconstitute long-term combat power capable of waging high-intensity war with NATO, whatever happens in Ukraine. Germany should be taking the lead for continental security, not satisfying itself with meeting basic benchmarks.

Other NATO members are playing the same games as the U.K. and Germany.

Belgium, a woefully low defense spender that somehow retains the honor of hosting NATO headquarters, is attempting to count more than $1 billion in tax revenue on seized Russian assets as defense spending. Italy’s defense minister has also stated that growing defense spending to 5% of GDP “is unthinkable. European countries cannot touch welfare and social achievements.” Absurdly, Italy wants to include “competitiveness” as part of the 1.5% allotment.

Spain, one of NATO’s lowest percentage of GDP defense spenders, has similarly sought to include “climate change”-related expenditures as part of the 1.5% allotment. That Italy and Spain, with their respective third and fourth largest economies in the EU, play these budget games is concerning: These two nations already have some of the very lowest percentages of GDP defense expenditures in NATO.

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Where does this leave us?

Well, put simply, with NATO member states spending more but not nearly enough and not on the right things, which is not a healthy ingredient for the world’s most successful defensive alliance.