All eyes on Thursday’s meeting of EU leaders
But governments are also coming round to the view that an increased role in Ukraine’s future security means greater military capacity, and in turn the financing to pay for it. Those realities are likely to be front and center at a meeting of the EU’s 27 national leaders in Brussels on Thursday. Despite leading Sunday’s charge, Starmer and the U.K., of course, won’t be in attendance.
Speaking to French daily Le Figaro after the summit, French President Emmanuel Macron demanded that NATO countries invest more in their armies.
“For the past three years, the Russians have been spending 10 percent of their GDP on defense,” he said. “We need to prepare what comes next, with an objective of 3 to 3.5 percent of GDP.”
NATO’s current spending target is an annual 2 percent of gross domestic product, but many European governments don’t even manage that, much to Trump’s annoyance. France just sneaks over the line at 2.1 percent.
In order to massively jolt European defense budgets the French president urged the bloc to raid centralized EU programs “that aren’t being used.”
“We need to give a mandate to the [European] Commission to use innovative funding,” he said. “That means either common borrowing, or the European Stability Mechanism [the bailout fund created in the wake of the eurozone debt crisis] … in a first instance we need €200 billion to be able to invest.”
As she left the summit, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said now was the moment to “urgently rearm Europe.”
