Medea Benjamin responds to leaders of the Atlantic alliance setting a military-spending target for themselves so staggering it exceeds that of the U.S.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Wednesday following the alliance’s annual summit in The Hague. (NATO/Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
By Medea Benjamin
Common Dreams
At this week’s NATO summit in The Hague, leaders announced an alarming new goal: push military spending to 5 percent of nations’ GDP by 2035.
Framed as a response to rising global threats, particularly from Russia and terrorism, the declaration was hailed as a historic step.
But in truth, it represents a major step backwards — away from addressing the urgent needs of people and the planet, and toward an arms race that will impoverish societies while enriching weapons contractors.
This outrageous 5 percent spending target didn’t come out of nowhere — it’s the direct result of years of bullying by U.S. President Donald Trump.
During his first term, Trump repeatedly berated NATO members for not spending enough on their militaries, pressuring them to meet a 2 percent GDP threshold that was already controversial and so excessive that nine NATO countries still fall below that “target.”
Now, with Trump back in the White House, NATO leaders are falling in line, setting a staggering 5 percent target that even the United States — already spending over $1 trillion a year on its military — doesn’t reach.
This is not defense; it’s extortion on a global scale, pushed by a president who views diplomacy as a shakedown and war as good business.
Countries across Europe and North America are already slashing public services and yet they are now expected to funnel even more taxpayer money into war preparation. Currently, no NATO country spends more on the military than on health or education. But if they all hit the new 5 percent military spending goal, 21 of them would spend more on weapons than on schools.
Spain was one of the few to reject this escalation, with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez making clear that his government would not sacrifice pensions and social programs to meet a militarized spending target. Other governments, including Belgium and Slovakia, quietly pushed back too.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday in The Hague. (NATO/Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Still, NATO leaders pressed on, cheered by Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who fawned over Trump’s demand that Europe boost defense spending. Rutte even referred to Trump as “Daddy,” a comment that — while dismissed as a joke — spoke volumes about NATO’s subservience to U.S. militarism.
Under Trump’s influence, the NATO alliance is shedding even the pretense of being a defensive pact, embracing instead the language and logic of perpetual war.
Just before NATO leaders were gathering at The Hague, protesters took to the streets under the banner “No to NATO.” And back in their home countries, civic groups are demanding a redirection of resources toward climate justice, healthcare, and peace.
Polls show that majorities in the U.S. oppose increased military spending, but NATO is not accountable to the people. It’s accountable to political elites, arms manufacturers and a Cold War logic that sees every global development through the lens of threat and domination.
Royal dinner party for NATO summit-goers hosted by Dutch King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima on Tuesday. (NATO/Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
NATO’s expansion, both in terms of war spending and size (it has grown from 12 founding members to 32 countries today) has not brought peace. On the contrary, the alliance’s promise that Ukraine would one day join its ranks was one of the triggers for Russia’s brutal war.
Instead of de-escalating, the alliance has doubled down with weapons, not diplomacy.
In Gaza, Israel continues its U.S.-backed war with impunity, while NATO nations send more arms and offer no serious push for peace. Now the alliance wants to drain public coffers to sustain these wars indefinitely. NATO is also surrounding its adversaries, particularly Russia, with ever more bases and troops.
All of this demands a radical rethink. As the world burns — literally — NATO is stocking up on kindling. When healthcare systems are crumbling, schools underfunded and blazing temperatures making large swaths of the planet uninhabitable, the idea that governments should commit billions more to weapons and war is obscene.
Real security doesn’t come from tanks and missiles — it comes from strong communities, global cooperation, and urgent action on our shared crises.
We need to flip the script. That means cutting military budgets, withdrawing from endless wars and beginning a serious conversation about dismantling NATO.
The alliance, born of the Cold War, is now a stumbling block to global peace and an active participant in war-making. Its latest summit only reinforces that reality.
This is not just about NATO’s budget — it’s about our future. Every euro or dollar spent on weapons is one not spent on confronting the climate crisis, lifting people out of poverty, or building a peaceful world. For the future of our planet, we must reject NATO and the war economy.
Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of CODEPINK and the co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange. She has been an advocate for social justice for more than 40 years. She is the author of 10 books, including Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control; Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the US-Saudi Connection; and Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Her articles appear regularly in outlets such as Znet, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, CommonDreams, Alternet and The Hill.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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The final ‘trigger for Russia’s war’ was the fact that, while Lavrov was in Geneva trying to negotiate a balance of forces on Russia’s borders (which could have benefited both sides – saved a lot of cash and lives) and cooperation on the Minsk agreement, his US counterpart was sending ever more weapons by air into Kiev and refusing to discuss any action to reduce the tensions between Russia and the West.
We now have a situation where no OTAN state dare question the call to arms. Their peoples are so convinced (the ‘OTAN California’ syndrome), they will never risk being hung out to dry by Trump. And with leaders like Rutte, determined to surpass the previous self-serving NATO bosses, global warming can only get hotter.
If Trump wanted to be honorable, he would retroactively enforce the promise made by the US to not move NATO one inch east.
Of course, the entire MICIMATT complex would attack him if he did.
Rutte went waaay over the top in flattering Trump, prior to and during, the gathering of “peacemakers” . Rutte is not a particularly bright guy, but someone told him just how much Netanyahu gets out of Trump through flattery and Rutte jumped all in. Sure, the Daddy thing was peak cringe, but it worked. Rutte is a simpleton, almost always with a goofy grin on his face, even while discussing war issues. It’s a real mystery to me as to how Europe could elect/appoint so many shallow, non-intellectual leaders in such a short period of time. I’ll mention 5 names: Von der Leyen, Kallas, Stoltenberg, Rutte, BoJo, Truss, Sunak, Starmer, Sholz, Merz, Macron.
Okay, I didn’t stop at 5. How could I ?
Rutte experienced the ultimate pride of an official of the empire, their place in life is made by the grace of emperor, be it a methodical and mature Vespasian or erratic teenager Caligula. Flattering the emperor IN PERSON puts you as high in the empire hierarchy as a person can be, not writing letters that go to unread pile, not shouting as a crowd member, but individually, in person. How many toils and stratagems are needed to rise so high! Needless to say, if Caligula tells you “five percent”, five percent it is!
Most of Eurocrats are relatively young, educated to put total deference to USA, and by extension, to POTUS.
The cold war was an economic arms race to bankrupt the enemy that is not With US,. Now we hope to use all of the new NATO nations together to bankrupt those not conforming to our economic control. The stick is economic sanctions if they don’t pony up but the carrot is just subservience to economic control. The allure of freedom may become too enticing to ignore.
A real world order with less dominance may become appealing to some than a world in chaos..
Really depressing that when the world needs to cooperate in order to get through the next century in the face of environmental catastrophe, there is this rabid consensus among the elite that we need nothing but endless militarization and war for no reason other than to bleed societies and feed psychopath oligarchs. We need to get off this ride NOW.
A lot of people get it, but not nearly enough. This will make life worse for everyone in nearly every way imaginable, and is happening only to profit a tiny few.
Who has Russia threatened??????? Her “unprovoked invasion ” of Ukraine led by a government put in place by the CIA came after exhaustive negotiations including the UN but ignored by the West. Russia does not threaten European nations .
No attempt at agreement to Russian needs for security is made.
Nato should have been quietly dissolved long ago. Instead it refuses to die–hyped up with warmongering and now this military spending target. Obscene is exactly the right word. It is possible that the US may eventually realize that, in the end, they may not want these Nato countries to have much more military power than they do now. The US has been the big, big boy on the block, including in Europe, for a long time, and I doubt they really want that to change.
Imagine you have a big sack of rice, just enough to last the year (until the next harvest). Then Mark Rutte barges into your home and demands 1/20th of your rice. “I won’t take it all,” he says, “just enough to keep you safe from those evil Russkies.” The last few weeks before the harvest, your family is out of rice; however, you are safe from the Russkies! Mark Rutte’s Hefalump trap works.
Isn’t it more about enriching Trump’s friends in the military industrial complex? Trump is a shyster…when will people wake up to this reality?
The working class already knows this. It is the bourgeoisie who are fawning over (or bending over, depending on the abjectness of their capitulation) these ultra-right-wing dictats. Sacrificing all social programs that benefit workers and the poor to make endless war, these so-called “democracies” pledge their allegiance to mammon and Mars though the heavens fall.
The libertarian U.S. led at present, led by you know who, seeks to erode the social safety net of Canada and other countries with single payer health care in order to level the playing field and shut up those clamouring for a more equitable system, while as you stated, enriching arms makers and opening the door to privatizing health care.
The effort is entirely bipartisan. America has been covertly attacking the Canadian health insurance system for decades.
Wait! Haven’t the other NATO countries observed what rampant militarism has done to the U.S. and the world since Dwight Eisenhower cautioned against the Military-Industrial complex in his farewell address in 1960? We have been plunging ever more deeply into fear and poverty of body and spirit ever since. The whole world has become a bunch of siloed armed camps, locked in an atmosphere of autocratically driven fear. People are being crushed out of existence or simply being exterminated. We cannot continue to even exist in this kind of hell.
You’re right.
Other NATO countries have observed, and their compradore leaders salivate with envy and enthusiasm for what the US has accomplished against its citizenry.
The royal dinner party photo makes the situation clear: the.plutocracy will need all that military power to protect the global ‘gated community’ from the rabble. From the oligarchic mind set it would just cost too much of ‘their wealth’ to support ‘economic equity’, ‘manage the environment’ and ‘allow for social justice’; it is ‘their money/power/impunity’ and getting the rabble to fund a military so they can keep it all seems both natural and necessary.
We are seeing the Great Bait and Switch before our eyes: nation based antagonisms used as the argument to construct militarized systems to protect wealth against the coming cataclysms of environmental and economic disruptions.
Of course. NATO is a “protection racket’.
“A protection racket is a type of racket and a scheme of organized crime perpetrated by a potentially hazardous organized crime group that generally guarantees protection outside the sanction of the law to another entity or individual from violence, robbery, ransacking, arson, vandalism, and other such threats, in exchange for payments at regular intervals. Each payment is called “protection money” or a “protection fee”. An organized crime group determines an affordable or reasonable fee by negotiating with each of its payers, to ensure that each payer can pay the fee on a regular basis and on time. Protections rackets can vary in terms of their levels of sophistication or organization.”
Wikipedia