BRUSSELS, August 28. /TASS/. Defense spending by all countries except Iceland will amount to 2% of their GDP this year, with the alliance's total defense budget estimated at $1.4 trillion, according to a recently released NATO report.
Defense spending is expected to grow by 15.9% in 2025. The military budgets of the alliance countries have grown steadily since 2014, the last year they recorded a decline. During this time, higher growth rates in defense budgets were only observed in 2024 (18.6%).
This year, for the first time, all NATO countries except Iceland, which does not have a regular army and is therefore not included in military spending statistics, increased their military spending to 2% of GDP. This was the previous target that most member countries had been unable to achieve for about ten years. In 2024, only 18 out of 32 countries achieved this target, compared to ten a year earlier.
At the NATO summit in The Hague in June, alliance countries approved a new target: by 2035, they must spend 5% of their GDP on defense, with 3.5% going directly to military spending and 1.5% to civilian infrastructure related to defense needs. Eastern European countries are close to this target: Poland (4.48%), Lithuania (4%), Latvia (3.73%), and Estonia (3.38%). Norway, the US, and Denmark will also spend more than 3% of their GDP on defense this year.