Days before NATO leaders convene in Ankara, President Donald Trump has reignited the alliance’s burden-sharing dispute with a Truth Social post that lists $999 billion in US defence spending between 2014 and 2025, alongside far smaller sums for the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Poland, and describes the contributions of Germany and others as “much lower” and “ridiculous”. The figures, which Trump frames as money spent “on NATO” without any benefit, are in fact total US defence outlays, the bulk of which fund Indo-Pacific posture, Middle East operations, homeland defence and nuclear modernisation rather than the alliance itself. The post sets the stage for what Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called “probably the most important summit in the organisation’s history”, where Washington is expected to demand concrete progress toward a new target of 5 percent of GDP on security by 2035 and to threaten a reduced American contribution if allies do not comply.

Viewed from Washington, the message is one of transactional accountability. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has warned that NATO must become a “two-way street”, and the Pentagon is conducting a six-month review aimed at making Europe assume “primary responsibility” for continental defence, including the possible withdrawal of a carrier strike group and all US submarines assigned to the alliance. Trump’s post also lands amid a separate diplomatic row with Rome: Italy refused to permit the use of its bases for refuelling during US strikes on Iran, and the president subsequently claimed Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni “begged” him for a photograph, an account Palazzo Chigi called “completely invented”. Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani cancelled a planned visit to the United States, and Meloni accused Trump of treating allies more harshly than adversaries.

European officials and NATO headquarters in Brussels counter that the burden-sharing picture has transformed since the 2014 Wales pledge. For the first time, all 32 allies now spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defence. European members and Canada together raised defence spending by nearly 20 percent in 2025 to $574 billion, the largest single-year increase in alliance history. Germany, which Trump’s post does not quantify, boosted its outlays by more than 20 percent to €88.8 billion, placing it second in absolute terms. Poland leads on the GDP metric at 4.3 percent, followed by Latvia and Estonia. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who met Trump in Washington last week, has said the Ankara summit will announce “billions of dollars in new contracts” that could benefit US defence firms, while also noting that European allies are already filling many of the capability gaps left by US reductions.

The structural tension, analysts in London and continental capitals note, is that Trump’s pressure has worked precisely because European governments concluded he might walk away, yet his simultaneous support for far-right parties such as Alternative for Germany and France’s National Rally empowers forces that oppose the very policies Washington demands: higher defence spending, de-risking from Chinese technology and sanctions pressure on Moscow. The summit, hosted by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, will also address the future of support for Ukraine and the alliance’s posture toward Russia, with Rutte warning that Moscow could be ready to use military force against NATO within five years. The gathering is expected to produce a communiqué on new spending benchmarks and a roadmap for European capability development, but the underlying question of whether the US anchor will hold remains unresolved.