Poland Backs Trump’s Call to Up NATO Defense Spending to 5 Percent of GDP

Poland has backed President-elect Donald Trump’s proposal that NATO member states up their defense spending to 5 percent of GDP.

Warsaw has thrown its weight behind the president-elect’s plans to raise the level of contribution demanded by the defense organization, as currently, just 24 out of 32 nations meet the current spending level of 2 percent of GDP.

The eastern European country, which shares a border with Ukraine, said 5 percent should be the goal, even if it were to take some NATO states a decade to reach it.

Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz told the Financial Times: “If we could afford to go into debt to rebuild after Covid, then we must surely find the money to protect ourselves from war.

“I know this is not a view shared by all, but Poland has a different opinion. We need to remember that there are some big European countries whose opinion was not always the right one, and that in relation to Russia they were wrong.”

On Jan. 7, at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump, who was also vocal about NATO members paying more during his previous term in office, said: “They can all afford it, but they should be at 5 percent not 2 percent.

“Europe is in for a tiny fraction of the money that we’re in. We have a thing called the ocean in between us, right? Why are we in for billions and billions of dollars more money than Europe?”

The 5 percent target proposed by Trump is more than any NATO member, including the United States, currently spends on defense.

Poland is the closest to spending what the incoming U.S. president suggests, with 4.12 percent of its GDP going on defense in 2024, and it already has plans to increase that to 4.7 percent through 2025.

The next highest contributor in terms of percentage of GDP is Estonia, which shares a border with Russia, with Tallinn devoting 3.43 percent to defense last year.

Washington is in third place by this metric, with the United States spending 3.38 percent of its GDP on defense in 2024, but it is by far the biggest spender in real terms.

The member states currently not meeting the 2 percent guideline are Spain, Slovenia, Luxembourg, Belgium, Canada, Italy, Portugal, and Croatia.

The average of all nations combined is 2.71 percent, and last year, the alliance estimated the combined defense spending of its members at $1.474 trillion in 2024—about $968 billion from the United States and $507 billion from European nations and Canada.

Though Poland is the only country to publicly back the specific figure of 5 percent called for by Trump, officials from member nations have accepted that defense spending needs to rise, and a new target is likely to be agreed upon at a NATO summit at The Hague, Netherlands, in June.

Among those to acknowledge the need for higher defense spending was UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who said during a speech in London on Jan. 9 that Europe’s security was on a “knife edge” and that “the post-Cold War peace is well and truly over.”

“Donald Trump and JD Vance are simply right when they say that Europe needs to do more to defend its own continent,” Lammy said. “It’s myopia to pretend otherwise with Russia on the march.”

The UK currently spends 2.3 percent of its GDP on defense and says it aims to increase it to 2.5 percent.

In December 2024, Mark Rutte, who took over from Jens Stoltenberg as NATO secretary-general in October 2024, also said Trump was correct to insist on higher spending, saying the incoming president is “totally right” when he says Europe is “not doing enough” on defense.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.