![]() and European lawmakers about budget priorities, Luxembourg Defense Minister François Bausch said last month that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania would have to spend four to five times more than they do now to reach 2% if their economic growth matched that of Luxembourg. No date will be set for achieving this target. “At the summit, allies will set a more ambitious defense investment pledge, to invest a minimum of 2% of GDP annually on defense,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Friday. President Joe Biden and his NATO counterparts will commit to a new spending goal at their two-day summit in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius starting on Tuesday. With that target date closing in, and the biggest land war in Europe in decades ravaging Ukraine, U.S. Under a pledge made in 2014, after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, NATO allies agreed to halt the spending cuts they made in calmer times after the Cold War ended, boost their national military budgets and move toward spending 2% of GDP on defense by 2024. Still, the numbers are deceiving, and that goes for other members too, like Germany. That puts it at the foot of the 31-nation military alliance’s charts. One of NATO’s richest countries, and routinely ranked at the top of Europe’s economic growth tables, the Grand Duchy currently spends 0.72% of gross domestic product on its armed forces, according to the organization’s estimates for this year. BRUSSELS (AP) - When it comes to criticizing the NATO members who fail to spend enough on defense, tiny Luxembourg is an easy target.
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