'Europe must do more': Starmer supports Trump in calling out NATO countries not spending enough on defence

18 December 2024, 07:00 | Updated: 18 December 2024, 07:18

Sir Keir Starmer has backed Donald Trump's calls for NATO countries to meet their spending targets on defence.

The Prime Minister told LBC's Nick Ferrari at Breakfast that the US president-elect was right to say that "Europe needs to do more" on military expenditure.

Mr Trump, who will return to the White House in January, has urged the US' European allies to bolster military spending, and claimed it's unfair that Washington spends so much more on defence.

Starmer said he had been having "constructive discussions" with Trump on a number of issues, including the military.

"As you know I met him a number of weeks ago," he told Nick. "I do think that when he says that Europe needs to do more, as a general proposition I think that’s right, and we should do more.

Listen to Nick's full interview with the Prime Minister from 7am on Global Player.

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But he added that there was "a huge amount of capability that we are doing together.:

NATO members are supposed to allocate at least 2% of their GDP to defence spending - but even amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, not all of them do.

Portugal, Italy, Canada, Belgium, Luxembourg, Slovenia and Spain all have military expenditure that is under the threshold.

The UK is the ninth-highest spender as a proportion of GDP. Poland is the highest, at 4.1%, with the US on about 3.4%

In raw terms, the US is the biggest contributor to NATO along with Germany, providing about 16% of the total budget.

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Asked if everyone should "pay their way", Sir Keir said he wasn't "going to sit here in an interview and start telling allies what they must do."

He added that "all of our allied countries make a huge contribution to our collective defence and if Putin thought by his aggression in Ukraine that he was going to weaken NATO he made a big mistake.

Sir Keir said that NATO was "now stronger" since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

"We have extra members, and we are constantly working together - training together, deployed together. Just up the coast here we’ve got our troops embedded as part of our NATO deployment.

Sir Keir also hailed the efforts of the British military, in particular in response to the ‘constant threat’ of Russia.

"There’s a real appreciation for what our teams are doing as part of that NATO deployment," he said.

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But Sir Keir refused to commit to increasing defence spending to 3% as he insisted the priority was "working collectively".

Instead the PM reiterated the government's commitment to increasing defence spending to 2.5% of GDP.

It comes after the head of Nato warned that the West is not ready for the threats it will face from Russia in the coming years.

Calling on members of the military alliance to shift into a wartime mindset, Mark Rutte, the secretary general of the organisation, said spending must increase far above the current rate.

Mr Rutte warned that Nato is “not ready” for what is to come as he said the current security situation was the "worst in my lifetime".

Chancellor Rachel Reeves said earlier in the month that Labour will not be able to raise defence spending without making cuts in other areas.