A year ago, Donald Trump got NATO allies to promise they would spend 5 percent of GDP on defense. This week, at the Ankara summit, he intends to collect.
The pledge
At the NATO summit in The Hague in June 2025, alliance leaders committed to raising their defense spending to 5 percent of GDP by 2035. The promise was a direct result of Trump’s pressure campaign. He had spent his first year back in office telling European allies that the United States would not continue to bankroll their security while they spent well below the old 2 percent target.
At the time, only a handful of NATO members met even the 2 percent threshold. The 5 percent pledge was seen as a victory for Trump’s approach: extract a public commitment, then use future summits to hold allies to it.
Now the summit is in Ankara. Trump is on his way. And the question is whether the promises made in The Hague will survive contact with reality.
The gap
NATO’s own data shows the gap between promise and performance. Poland, the alliance’s top spender, allocates about 4.7 percent of GDP to defense. The Baltic states and Greece are in the 3 to 4 percent range. Most of Western Europe is still below 2 percent.
The 5 percent target by 2035 was always more aspirational than realistic. Several European economies are already squeezed by inflation, energy costs, and competing domestic priorities. Germany, Europe’s largest economy, would need to roughly double its defense budget to meet the target. France and Italy face similar arithmetic.
The argument from European allies is not that the spending is unnecessary. Most acknowledge that Russia’s war on Ukraine has fundamentally changed the security landscape. The argument is about speed. Raising defense spending by several percentage points of GDP in a decade requires political capital that few European governments have to spare.
Trump’s leverage
Trump’s enforcement mechanism is straightforward: if allies do not pay, the United States will not guarantee their defense. He has said this repeatedly, in public and in private. European officials who have met with him describe the message as unambiguous.
This week’s summit in Ankara will test the threat. The summit agenda includes the war in Ukraine, the NATO response to Russian aggression, and the alliance’s long-term force posture. But the underlying question, as always, is who pays.
Trump enters the summit with some leverage. The US defense budget is larger than that of all other NATO members combined. Without American logistics, intelligence, and air power, European forces would struggle to operate effectively. The European NATO members know this.
But the leverage cuts both ways. NATO’s European members have begun to plan for a future without reliable American backing. Several are increasing defense industrial production independently. The EU has launched joint procurement initiatives. The message from Brussels is that Europe can defend itself if necessary, it would just prefer not to.
What Ankara will show
The summit will produce the usual joint communique affirming NATO unity and resolve. Behind the scenes, the real negotiations will be about numbers: which allies are on track to meet the 5 percent target, which are falling behind, and what the consequences will be.
Trump is expected to hold bilateral meetings with several European leaders. The tone of those meetings will signal whether enforcement is coming or whether the administration is willing to accept gradual progress.
For Ukraine, the outcome matters directly. The air defense ammunition Kyiv is pleading for depends on NATO members having both the political will and the industrial capacity to supply it. A serious European defense build-up would free up American resources for Ukraine. A prolonged argument over spending targets will delay both.
The bottom line
Trump got the promise. Now he has to get the money. The NATO summit in Ankara will show whether a year of preparation has been enough, or whether the 5 percent target was always a number written in pencil, waiting to be erased.