Europe at a Crossroads: NATO Spending Surges 20% as Kubilius Calls for EU Army

NATO's European allies and Canada increased their combined defense spending by nearly 20 percent in real terms during 2025, marking the second consecutive year of such dramatic increases, according to the alliance's annual report published on April 9, 2026. Secretary-General Mark Rutte presented the figures in Washington alongside U.S. President Donald Trump, revealing that the surge totaled approximately $574 billion in additional expenditure compared to 2024. For the first time in the alliance's history, every member state now meets the longstanding 2 percent of GDP defense spending threshold, a milestone that seemed improbable just five years ago.

The spending acceleration is driven by a convergence of pressures that have fundamentally altered Europe's threat calculus. Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine continues to pose the most immediate conventional military challenge to the continent, while the Trump administration's increasingly hostile posture toward NATO itself has forced European capitals to reckon with the possibility that American security guarantees may no longer be unconditional. The result is a defense buildup without recent precedent in post-Cold War Europe, one that is reshaping the continent's security architecture in real time.

Poland remains the alliance's leading spender by share of GDP, having committed over 4.7 percent of its economic output to defense. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have similarly sustained spending levels well above the alliance average, reflecting their proximity to Russia and the enduring anxiety generated by the war in Ukraine. Among the Nordic members, Finland and Sweden have rapidly integrated into NATO's force structure since their respective accessions, with Sweden preparing to lead a new battle group deployment to Rovaniemi in Finnish Lapland starting in 2026, a move that significantly strengthens NATO's northern flank posture against Russian forces in the Kola Peninsula.

Yet the spending figures tell only part of the story. The deeper shift underway in European defense is institutional and political, and it was on vivid display this week when EU Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius used a POLITICO interview to renew his call for the creation of a common European military force. Speaking just before Rutte's White House meeting, Kubilius argued that Europe's response to the crisis in transatlantic relations should be to build genuinely autonomous military capabilities rather than continue relying exclusively on the NATO framework.

Kubilius's remarks carry weight not merely because of his institutional position but because they reflect a rapidly shifting public mood. A European Pulse survey conducted by Cluster17 for POLITICO and beBartlet, polling 6,698 adults across six EU member states between March 13 and March 21, found that only 35 percent of respondents viewed the United States as a close ally or partner. Sixty percent described Washington as a competitor or a threat. Those numbers would have been unthinkable a decade ago and represent a seismic shift in European public opinion that policymakers can no longer ignore.

The same survey found that 86 percent of respondents favored Europe developing its own defense capabilities, with 69 percent supporting the creation of a common European military force. Three-quarters of those polled said they would support sending their country's military to help a NATO ally under attack, suggesting that support for collective defense remains robust even as confidence in the United States as a reliable partner collapses. Kubilius seized on these findings to argue that the European public understands that the current patchwork of 27 national armies cannot deliver the security the continent needs.

The timing of these developments is hardly coincidental. Rutte's meeting with Trump on April 9 ended poorly, with the U.S. president using the occasion to berate NATO allies for what he characterized as insufficient support for the Iran conflict. Trump subsequently took to Truth Social to declare that NATO was absent when the United States needed it and would not be available in the future either. His renewed threats to annex Greenland and the tariffs he has imposed on European allies have compounded the sense of betrayal in European capitals. For leaders in Berlin, Paris, and Warsaw, the message is unmistakable: the postwar security order predicated on American leadership of the Atlantic alliance is fracturing.

The institutional response is already taking shape. The EU has moved forward with plans to establish a Black Sea maritime security hub in Romania, designed to protect critical undersea infrastructure and improve NATO-EU coordination in a region where Russian naval activity remains intense. The Netherlands has announced its intention to reach the newly agreed 5 percent of GDP defense spending target by 2035, with the caretaker cabinet in The Hague committing to 3.5 percent for core defense spending plus an additional 1.5 percent for defense-related expenditures. Germany's naval deployments have expanded to include sustained operations in the Baltic and North Seas, reflecting Berlin's growing willingness to project maritime power in support of alliance objectives.

The debate over a European army, however, remains deeply contested within the EU itself. Kaja Kallas, the bloc's top diplomat, has publicly rejected the idea, preferring instead to strengthen existing frameworks of cooperation among national militaries. The practical obstacles are formidable: divergent procurement systems, incompatible command structures, linguistic barriers, and the fundamental question of political control over deployed forces. Yet the political momentum behind some form of deeper European defense integration appears unstoppable, driven by the dual pressures of Russian aggression and American unreliability.

What makes this moment distinctive is that European rearmament is no longer a rhetorical aspiration but a fiscal and industrial reality. Defense contractors across the continent are reporting order backlogs stretching years into the future. Rheinmetall in Germany, KNDS in France, and Leonardo in Italy have all announced major capacity expansions. The EU's defense industrial strategy, adopted in 2024, is beginning to channel procurement spending toward European manufacturers rather than American ones, a deliberate decoupling that would have been politically impossible before Trump's return to the White House.

The challenge ahead is whether Europe can translate spending increases and institutional reforms into genuine operational capability quickly enough to deter potential adversaries. The gap between announcing a defense budget increase and fielding combat-ready divisions, operational squadrons, and fully stocked ammunition reserves is measured in years, not months. Russia's military, despite enormous losses in Ukraine, is rebuilding and adapting. The window of vulnerability during which Europe is spending more but not yet capable of more remains open.

For NATO, the alliance faces an existential paradox. Its European members are spending more and doing more than at any point since the Cold War, yet the political foundation of the alliance, the American commitment to collective defense under Article 5, has never been more uncertain. Whether the current surge in European defense spending ultimately strengthens NATO or hastens its transformation into something fundamentally different depends on decisions being made now in Washington, Brussels, and European capitals. The numbers are moving in the right direction. The politics are moving in uncharted territory.