The Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, during a press conference, at the Aliance's Brussels headquarters, Belgium, February 12, 2025. Photo: Dursun Aydemir / AFP / Profimedia
The Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, proposed to the 32 alliance member countries to allocate at least 5% of their gross domestic product (GDP) for military and security expenses by 2032, Dutch Prime Minister, Dick Schoof announced on Friday, AFP reported.
Mark Rutte “is expected at the NATO Summit”, from June in The Hague, the goal to be achieved by 2032 “to be 3.5% for military expenses and 1.5% for related expenses, such as infrastructure and cyber security,” Schof said at a press conference.
This level of expenses corresponds to the requests formulated repeatedly by the team of US President Donald Trump.
The proposal was made a little over a week by NATO Secretary General, for an agreement at the next summit of the North Atlantic Alliance, scheduled for June 24 and 25, explained Schoof.
Asked about these figures in a press conference on Friday, Rutte refused to confirm them.
“I will not confirm the figures (…) I have always said that if we keep at 2% of GDP, we will not be able to defend ourselves. So we must increase the defense expenses,” he said, without going into details.
By the end of 2024, 22 NATO countries achieved the 2% of GDP objective for military expenses, agreed in 2014 at a summit of the Alliance. Several countries, including Italy, Spain and Belgium, have not yet achieved this goal.
The allocation of 3.5% of GDP for strictly military expenses by 2032 will be a significant budgetary effort for these countries. On the other hand, these states will be much easier to allocate 1.5% of GDP for security -related expenses, some of them, such as the construction of the transport infrastructure, are already taken into account.
