European leaders will gather Monday to plot a rough path forward on defense. Wavering support from President Trump is likely to drive the debate.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago convinced Europe’s leaders that they needed to spend more money on defense. On Monday, leaders from across the European Union and Britain will meet in Brussels to debate a vexing question: how to pay for it.
It is a concern made more acute by President Trump’s return to the White House.
The United States is the largest military funder of Ukraine’s war effort, but Mr. Trump has suggested he will rapidly withdraw U.S. financial and military support and leave it to the Europeans. He has also insisted that NATO nations ramp up defense outlays to 5 percent of their annual economic output, a drastic increase from the 3 percent or 3.5 percent NATO plans to make its goal at its next summit meeting this summer.
The United States itself spends only about 3.4 percent of gross domestic product on defense.
With the war, the European Union, which was founded on free trade and termed itself a “peace project,” has become more committed to deterrence and defense. It is now scrambling to expand its defense industries and make spending more efficient and collaborative. Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain will attend Monday’s gathering, the first time since Britain left the European Union that a British leader has met with the 27 leaders of the bloc in Brussels.
Part of the debate will be whether the European Union will be able to raise more money to pay for defense through common debt, as it did to fight Covid.
But the issue is thorny: Such joint fund-raising might impede the efforts of member countries to meet the individual demands that the NATO alliance is already making of them in terms of raising military budgets. Of the 27 E.U. countries that will meet in the closed-door session on Monday, 23 are members of NATO.