"We will confirm here the decisions of Wales [the 2014 summit]. To confirm this means no more and no less," Merkel told reporters prior to the summit.
"I am glad that the NATO Secretary General said about Germany that it is good that we increased our defense budget within the framework of the "big coalition, "and that guarantees of increasing our funding for NATO, of course, are possible," Merkel added.
The defense spending became a sore point in discussions among NATO members as US President Donald Trump administration has stressed repeatedly that all the alliance's members should respect their NATO budget responsibilities.
In March, Trump wrote on Twitter that Germany owed "vast sums of money" to NATO and the United States for the defense they provided. This claim was later refuted by German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen.
German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said in late March that he did not know any politicians in Germany who saw increase of defense expenditures to 2 percent of GDP, set as a goal in NATO 2014 Wales Summit Declaration, as either possible or desirable.
As of 2016, only five countries met the target: the United States, Greece, Estonia, the United Kingdom and Poland, while Germany's contribution was 1.2 percent of its GDP.
