Having already admitted it would fail to meet the two per cent of GDP spent on defence it promised in 2014, Germany is now set to likely miss even its reduced target in news that will doubtless do nothing to ease tensions between Chancellor Merkel and U.S. President Trump, who is pushing for fellow NATO members to pull their own weight.
All North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members pledged to spend two per cent of their national GDP on defence expenditure at the Cardiff summit in 2014, a move to encourage nations to actually meet the treaty obligation which is technically a requirement for membership but has in most cases never been realised.
For the most part, the vast majority of defence spending in NATO has been carried by just a handful of nations — predominantly the United States but also the United Kingdom, an imbalance President Trump has sought to redress since taking the Presidency.