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Live coverage from Munich: POLITICO is on the ground at the Munich Security Conference, where we’re having conversations with top officials, lawmakers and experts at our POLITICO Pub. Follow our exclusive coverage here.
MUNICH — NATO members will have to boost their defense spending by “considerably more than 3 percent” of GDP, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said Saturday during an interview at the POLITICO Pub on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.
U.S. President Donald Trump has demanded that allies commit 5 percent of their GDP to defense, a dramatic ramp-up on the 2 percent the defense alliance agreed on over a decade ago but that is now seen as too low to deal with the threat posed by Russia and the need to rearm while also sending weapons to Ukraine.
The future target should be agreed at NATO leaders’ summit in June in The Hague.
“Over the next couple of months we will get convergence” on the budget goal, Rutte said, adding that to increase spending “we will have to prioritize defense over other stuff.” That’s a reference to governments having to make difficult decisions on military spending over popular social welfare programs.
The alliance is setting new capability targets that will define where the extra cash should be directed. Rutte said it’s already clear that there’s a lack of air defense systems, long-range missiles and tanks to sustain armies.
“We have not paid enough over the last 40 years, particularly since the Berlin Wall came down,” Rutte said of Europe and Canada’s defense spending. “The U.S. is rightly asking for a rebalancing of that. It’s totally logical.”
Rutte also insisted that Washington remains committed to NATO, despite recent comments by U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that European allies “can’t make an assumption that America’s presence will last forever.”
The U.S. makes up over 50 percent of NATO’s GDP, so the alliance is “first of all an American organization,” he said. Rutte added there is “a clear commitment to NATO” on the part of the U.S.
The NATO chief also stressed that “everything is on the table” in any peace talks to end the fighting in Ukraine. There is confusion over that, as Trump and Hegseth have both ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine and said that Kyiv will not be able to recover all of the territory seized by Russia — although Hegseth has since tried to walk back some of those comments.
“We have to end this in a way … that Putin will not capture one square mile or one square kilometer of Ukraine, ” Rutte said, adding: “I don’t think it will be a bad deal.”
