Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
Warsaw is backing Donald Trump’s demand for Nato countries to spend 5 per cent of GDP on defence even if it will take 10 years for the alliance’s laggards to reach the target, says the Polish defence minister.
Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz told the Financial Times that his country “can be the transatlantic link between this challenge set by President Trump and its implementation in Europe”. Poland is the Nato member closest to meeting the new target, having earmarked 4.7 per cent of GDP for defence this year, the highest in the US-led military alliance.
Ahead of his return to the White House this month, Trump has raised the pressure on Nato members to increase spending on their military, given that just 23 of its 32 members currently meet the 2 per cent spending target, with Italy and Spain among the EU countries below this threshold.
Kosiniak-Kamysz said the new target was “an important wake-up call” for the alliance.
Reaching Trump’s goal “will take another decade, but I think he should not be criticised for setting a really ambitious target because otherwise there will be some countries that will continue to debate whether more spending is really needed,” he said.
After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Poland doubled its defence spending and ordered billions of dollars of mostly US and South Korean weapons. The minister said his government had no other option given the country’s proximity to Russia: “We have bought a lot, but our place on the map makes the investment and the purchase of equipment simply necessary.”
Italy, whose prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has a strong political affinity with the incoming Trump administration, has fallen well short of Nato’s target. Her government acknowledges the need to spend more on defence but is hamstrung by the country’s debt burden and the need to rein in public spending. Rome has urged fellow EU capitals to exclude military spending from public deficit calculations but its plea has been rebuffed.
Spain ranks last in terms of defence spending, having earmarked 1.28 per cent of GDP in 2024, according to Nato. To fend off criticism, the government stresses that its military is a generous contributor of troops and assets to Nato missions.
But Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s assurance that it will meet the 2 per cent target by 2029 is starting to look insufficient. The Socialist leader’s willingness to make bolder pledges is limited by his country’s pacifist leanings borne of a history that includes a military dictatorship. Even the conservative opposition is reluctant to back higher spending.
Warsaw wants to use Poland’s six-month rotating presidency of the EU, which started on January 1, to convince fellow member states to spend €100bn from the next common budget on defence. Talks on the seven-year budget starting in 2028 are due to kick off this year. The European Commission last year proposed a €1.5bn defence industry programme, which Kosiniak-Kamysz described as clearly insufficient.
“The EU has the capacity to reallocate money,” the minister said, adding it was his “priority” to ensure €100bn are earmarked for defence in coming years, including by redirecting unused money from a joint €800bn post-pandemic recovery fund which expires next year.
Kosiniak-Kamysz plans to present Poland’s plans on Monday during a meeting in Warsaw with counterparts from Germany, France, Italy and the UK.
“If we could afford to go into debt to rebuild after Covid, then we must surely find the money to protect ourselves from war,” he said. “I know this is not a view shared by all, but Poland has a different opinion. We need to remember that there are some big European countries whose opinion was not always the right one, and that in relation to Russia they were wrong.”
Kosiniak-Kamysz ruled out Poland sending troops to Ukraine to consolidate a potential ceasefire. Trump has promised to put an end to Russia’s war, even though he recently pushed back a deadline for achieving that from 24 hours to several months after taking office.
“When a peace plan emerges, we will discuss it, but the border states are not the ones who should in any way appear with their troops in Ukraine, because I think there should be greater burden sharing and diversification within Nato,” he said.
Estonia’s foreign minister last year told the FT that a broad European coalition, including the UK, had to prepare to send troops to Ukraine to underpin any peace deal Trump brokers.
Despite Poland being a staunch ally of Ukraine in its defence against Russia, their relationship has been strained by historic grievances, cheap Ukrainian farm exports, and growing frustration with Ukrainian nationals who left their country.
“Of course there is fatigue in Polish society, and it is understandable especially when people here see young Ukrainian men driving the latest cars or staying in five-star hotels,” he said.
Another recent point of friction was Poland’s refusal to supply Ukraine with its remaining stock of MiG-29 aircraft, which Warsaw said it still needed for its own security.
“On the one hand I understand President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, because it is his role to always demand greater assistance,” Kosiniak-Kamysz said. “But I think he and Ukraine must also remember that when others were only sending helmets, we sent tanks.”
