NATO’s spending pledge is no invitation for creative accounting
By
Justina Budginaite-Froehly, LeAnne Noelani Howard, Timo S. Koster
This article was first published in Defense News on November 5, 2025. This excerpt has been edited for style. Nearly five months have passed since the June 2025 NATO summit in The Hague, where allied leaders unveiled what seemed like a bold new commitment—a collective defense-spending benchmark of 5 percent of GDP by 2035. The […]