The Trump administration expects every one of its NATO allies to commit to increased defense spending in the coming weeks.

President Donald Trump repeatedly and frequently argued during his first term and the start of his second term that European countries have taken advantage of the United States for decades. He has called on them to significantly increase their defense spending to take the primary role in security on the continent.

Recommended Stories

• Pentagon begins process to remove over 1,000 trans troops
• Trump renews call for Ukraine war ceasefire, as Putin oversees massive Victory Day parade in Moscow
• Is Trump’s war with the Houthis really over?

“We expect that our NATO allies, all 31 other allies, including Canada, to commit to big increases in defense spending and defense-related spending to the sound of 5% of GDP,” U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker said on Fox Business Network on Thursday.

NATO requires all allies to spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense. While that goal has been in place for over a decade, a handful of NATO members have yet to meet that threshold. Only 23 of 32 NATO countries met the 2% marker in 2024.

Trump has said he wants every NATO member to increase defense spending to at least 5%, a mark that no country in the alliance hit last year.

Whitaker warned that such a dramatic increase in spending “is going to be incremental,” adding, “it needs to be a more solid commitment than we saw 10 years ago coming out of Wales,” referencing the 2014 NATO Summit in Newport.

Several NATO allies have announced their intent to increase defense spending and production in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Several eastern European countries that share a border with Russia and Belarus spent more than 3% of their GDP on defense last year and have already announced plans to increase that total.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth will meet with their NATO counterparts in the coming weeks ahead of the organization’s 2025 Summit at the Hague in late June, Whitaker said.

“We’re setting the table to make this happen, and it’s going to be historic and it’s going to finally shift the burden of European defense onto the Europeans, but we’ll continue to have U.S. leadership and involvement because that makes the alliance work the best,” he added.

During his first visit to Europe as secretary in February, Hegseth said that he came “to directly and unambiguously” tell allies “that stark realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Instead, he said the U.S. would “prioritize empowering Europe to own responsibility for its own security.”

HOUTHI ‘CAPITULATION’ AGAINST US DOESN’T END ISRAEL CONFLICT

Trump has threatened not to help “delinquent” countries that fail to hit the minimum spending threshold. This would violate one of the alliance’s founding principles, Article 5, which states that an attack against one NATO member must be considered an attack on all of them.

The only time Article 5 has ever been involved was on Sept. 12, 2001, one day after the terrorist attacks in New York City, Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon.