BRUSSELS--U.S. President Donald Trump's defence secretary told European allies on Wednesday to step up efforts to increase military budgets and warned that troop contributions to missions did not exempt them from broader spending goals, officials said.
Speaking two days after Trump proposed a 30 percent jump in U.S. military funding for Europe to deter Russia, U.S. Secretary of Defence Jim Mattis said allies should follow the example of the United States. "He insisted NATO allies show the same kind of commitment," said a NATO official present at the closed-door meeting of defence ministers at the alliance headquarters.
U.S. officials declined to comment on Mattis' address. But diplomats said the remarks reminded Europe that he has not given up on the tough message he first brought to NATO a year ago, when he said allies needed to honour spending pledges or risk less military support from the United States.
Mattis joined defence ministers to discuss the individual plans that NATO countries have submitted for the first time to show how they will reach a target to spend 2 percent of economic output on defence every year by 2024. Trump is set to review the plans at a NATO summit in July.
Fifteen of the 28 countries, excluding the United States, now have a strategy to meet a NATO benchmark first agreed in 2014 in response to Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region, following 25 years of cuts to European defence budgets.
But Spain has said it will not meet the 2024 target. Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Portugal, Norway and Denmark are also lagging. Hungary expects to meet the goal only by 2026.
France will increase its defence spending by more than a third between 2017 and 2025, but Germany, Europe's biggest economy, is not expected to reach the 2 percent target by 2024.
NATO data shows that Britain, Greece, Romania and the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania meet, or are close to, the 2 percent goal. France and Turkey are among those countries set to reach it soon.
Allies told the meeting that NATO goals needed to take into account countries such as Italy and Germany that are big contributors to NATO missions, such in Afghanistan, diplomats said. "It isn't just about dry figures," Germany's Ursula von der Leyen told reporters before the meeting. "It's also about who is ultimately doing what."
