The allies agreed to a new 5% GDP spending target by 2035. But signing a number is the easy part — the harder question is whether Europe can actually build the military capacity to match its promises.
For years, European leaders treated NATO defense spending targets like New Year’s resolutions — announced with fanfare, quietly abandoned by February. The 2% of GDP benchmark, first agreed in 2014, became a running joke: countries that met it were celebrated; those that did not faced gentle embarrassment that faded within weeks. Then came the war in Ukraine, and for a moment, the old habits cracked. Germany rushed to rearm. Poland doubled down. The Baltic states spent with urgency. But urgency, it turns out, has a half-life in European politics — and it runs out faster than anyone admits in public.
The new 5% target — agreed in principle at the most recent NATO summit — is being hailed as a historic shift. And in some ways it is. Asking European economies to commit 5% of their GDP to defense within a decade is a structural break from the post-Cold War consensus that America would handle the hard stuff while Europe invested in welfare states and diplomatic pleasantries. But targets and reality are different currencies. The question no one in Brussels wants to answer honestly is: what does 5% actually mean in ships, brigades, and functioning air defense systems?
The Gap Between Pledges and Capability
Consider Germany’s much-touted Zeitenwende — the “turning point” declared by Chancellor Scholz in February 2022, after Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine. Since then, Berlin has struggled to spend even 2% consistently, let alone translate higher budgets into usable military hardware. The Bundeswehr remains plagued by maintenance shortfalls, personnel shortages, and procurement delays measured in decades rather than years. Helicopters grounded for lack of spare parts. Submarines in dry dock. Artillery shells backordered into the next decade. Throwing money at that problem does not fix it overnight — the industrial base, the supply chains, the institutional expertise all take time to rebuild, and time is the one thing the new targets do not give you.
Poland is the exception that proves the European defense rule. Warsaw has genuinely committed beyond the 3% mark and is building a formidable land force anchored by modern American equipment, partly because it shares a 500-kilometer border with the part of Ukraine not yet occupied by Russian forces — proximity that concentrates the mind wonderfully. For most other NATO members, the political pressure to hit the new 5% target will create perverse incentives: spending on consultancy contracts, personnel costs, and bureaucracy that technically counts toward the percentage while producing little in the way of deployable combat power.
The American Signal
The Trump administration’s pressure on NATO to go further, faster, is rooted in a genuine strategic frustration that transcends domestic politics. For decades, the United States carried a disproportionate share of the alliance’s deterrence burden — writing the checks, positioning the troops, maintaining the nuclear umbrella that made European defense spending seem optional. European members, comfortably post-World War Two, treated defense spending as a budget line to be minimized, a convenient way to fund domestic priorities while free-riding on American power. The war in Ukraine exposed the results of that logic with uncomfortable clarity.
The reported withdrawal of American support for the NATO defense plan — confirmed by multiple outlets in May — is the most significant signal yet that the current U.S. administration will not wait for Europe to slowly figure this out. Europe can either build real military capacity or discover that the alliance’s Article 5 guarantee is only as strong as the political will of the moment. History suggests that guarantee requires credible deterrence — not just a budget line and a flag. The consequences of getting this wrong are not abstract.
What Europe Actually Needs
The harder conversation — the one that defense ministries quietly acknowledge but politicians avoid — is that Europe’s real problem is not money. It is time and structure. Modern air defense systems take five to eight years to procure and integrate into existing command architectures. A new generation of artillery requires industrial capacity that Europe largely shed after the Cold War, and rebuilding it means navigating procurement rules, union agreements, and competing political priorities that make the military calculus look simple by comparison.
Building a credible conventional deterrent requires not just spending increases but structural reform of procurement systems, maintenance chains, and personnel policy across dozens of countries with different military cultures, different threat perceptions, and different domestic political constraints. The 5% target gives European governments the political cover to make those hard reforms — if they choose to use it, and if they resist the temptation to game the accounting rather than build genuine capability.
Whether the summit’s declaration becomes a genuine turning point or just another entry in the long ledger of NATO promises broken and renewed will depend entirely on what happens in the next three years, not the next three months. The world is watching. So, increasingly, is the American taxpayer — and their patience is not infinite. If Europe’s leaders are serious this time, they will need to do more than sign a declaration. They will need to build the armies they have promised to build.
Anna Schmidt
Anna Schmidt covers European affairs and current affairs.