U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday said he was not sure the United States should be spending anything on NATO, telling reporters the U.S. was protecting NATO members, but they were "not protecting us.

While Canada’s spending on defence is less than 2 per cent, no NATO member spends as much as what Trump is requesting

If supporting Ukraine is the goal, “it's going to have to be the American defense industrial base continuing to power the fight.”

Trump has said members of the military alliance should spend 5% of their gross domestic product (GDP) on defence – a huge increase from the current 2% goal and a level that no NATO country, including the United States, currently achieves. Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.

President Donald Trump said NATO countries must sharply increase their defense spending, demanding member states push beyond current benchmarks that many of them already struggle to hit.

NATO countries should increase their defense spending to 5% of GDP. It would be a fair approach to reduce the financial burden on the United States, stated US President Donald Trump at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

I’m also going to ask all NATO nations to increase defense spending to 5% of [gross domestic product], which is what it should have been years ago,” he said in remarks given virtually to the. He noted that “most nations didn’t pay until I came along” in his first term in office.

US President Donald Trump, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, called for NATO nations to increase their defense spending to 5 percent of GDP, emphasizing that the United States has been shouldering an unfair burden in global defense spending,