It went something like this:
At the 2006 NATO summit, all members of the alliance unanimously pledged to
"commit a minimum of 2 percent of their GDP to spending on defense."
This agreement was made in good faith with no hard deadlines, base on the understanding that the little guys in the East with less money to spend would probably need more time to reach that target than the wealthy world powers with deep pockets and high-tech armies the West.
The U.S, U.K, Greece, little Poland, and tiny Estonia quickly fulfilled that pledge.
Everyone else in the club just plods along in the 8 years following that summit. Defense spending were set as low as they can just to keep their armies on life support, with no intention to ever reach that
minimum commitment. Because there's always
that other guy who will pick up the heavy lifting.
As the result, there's no shortage of news headlines about Allies military equipment breaking down, or comedic episodes like troops being sent to peace-keeping operations in the sand-blasted Middle East with jungle-green camo.
In 2014, this unacceptable "progress" was one of the main agendas at that year's NATO summit, and a hard deadline was set this time for all the laggards: 2024.
Here's the latest updates on our most trusted NATO allies:
- All of the current
contenders for France's Presidential office say they want France's defense spending (currently 1.79%) to reach at least 2% on their watch. Half of the pack actually want to boost it to 3%. I think we will actually see it happens in a few years.
- Germany is
increasing their military spending , albeit at a glacial rate. It is my personal opinion that they're dragging it out for as long as they could, and will probably reach that minimum target right before the 2024 ultimatum, nearly two decades after the 2006 Summit.
- Harper did some good things to get the Canadian military back on their feet again (they even have desert-theme camo now), and it looked promising for a while there, but Trudeau pretty much
abandoned that pledge all together when he took office. I do not think NATO should realistically exepects anything more than the current 1% from Canada.
- The U.K's defense spending had consistently exceeding 2% for decades, even before the 206 Summit. But after multiple rounds of absolutely-brutal budget cuts in recent years (that pretty much destroyed the Royal Navy), the British Ministry of Defence is now accused by independent defense analysts of cooking the books with "
creative accounting" to reach that target. If you take out the questionable stuff, they're at 1.98%.