No. of Recommendations: 2
Germany is a special case. They're by far the EU's richest member and they haven't paid anything close to the 2% in decades.
As a nation, you either believe national defense is a thing or you don't. Germany doesn't.
And while you single out Germany, at least 14 members now exceed their 2% target. Including the US. The rest have increased their spending, except for Italy (which has actually gone down a bit).Let's look at the data:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained...(%25_of_GDP).png
In 2021 the number was...
3. Greece, Estonia and Latvia. Since then it's gotten marginally better, but I have no idea where the number 14 came from. They're nowhere near that:
https://www.politico.eu/article/is-there-a-war-on-...Only 7 of 30 alliance members spent at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense in 2022.7. And one of them is us:
Of 30 members, only Greece, Poland, the Baltic states, the United Kingdom and the United States spent more than 2 percent of their economic output on defense last year, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s annual report shows. There's a word for this: freeloading. There's another word for this: deadbeat.
Politico has the data:
Nation / Defense as a % of GDP in 2022:
Greece - 3.54
US - 3.46
Lithuania - 2.47
Poland - 2.42
UK - 2.16
Estonia - 2.12
Latvia - 2.07
That's the 2% club. Notably all these nations except the US, UK and Greece are all ex-Soviet client states.
How about some NATO 'stalwart' countries?
France - 1.89
Italy - 1.51
Germany - 1.49
Canada - 1.29
Spain - 1.09
Sheesh.
