(Reuters) – NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has proposed that alliance members meet higher targets for defence spending by 2032, Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof said on Friday.
Reuters reported last week that Rutte had proposed NATO members raise defence spending to 3.5% of their GDP, and a further 1.5% on broader security-related items to meet U.S. President Donald Trump’s demand for a 5% target.
Speaking to reporters after a cabinet meeting, Schoof confirmed those figures, which would represent a major increase from the current NATO goal of spending 2% of GDP on defence.
NATO aims to agree the new targets at a summit of alliance leaders including Trump, in The Hague, on June 24-25.
“Rutte has sent a letter to all NATO members to say that he expects that the commitment at the NATO summit will be 3.5% on hard military spending, to be reached in 2032, and 1.5% on related spending such as on infrastructure, cyber security, and similar things also to be reached by 2032,” Schoof said.
NATO did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Schoof’s remarks.
He said the government of the Netherlands, where Rutte was a long-serving prime minister, would continue discussions to determine its position on the proposal.
Other NATO members were also considering Rutte’s request and would have to discuss it with their parliaments, he added.
Twenty-two of NATO’s 32 members meet the current 2% target. But leaders across NATO say that goal is no longer sufficient as they now regard Russia as a far greater threat in the wake of its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
No NATO country meets Trump’s 5% target. According to NATO, the United States spends about 3.2% of GDP on defence. Poland spends the biggest share of its GDP – at over 4%.
(Reporting by GV De Clercq and Andrew Gray; editing by Mark Heinrich)
