'We Need to Do More': Stoltenberg Calls for NATO Members to Pump Out Even More Military Spending
17:17 GMT 21.03.2023 (Updated: 23:43 GMT 21.03.2023)
© JOHN THYS
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At a Tuesday press conference outside NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, the alliance’s secretary general said member states need to increase their defense spending even more and increase their weapons shipments to Ukraine.
Many allies have also announced significant defense spending increases since the beginning of Russia's special operation in Ukraine, Stoltenberg said.
"Now these pledges must turn into real cash, contracts and concrete equipment," he added.
Noting that the alliance’s collective military spending had increased for eight years in a row, and increased by 2.2% in real terms last year, Stoltenberg urged even bigger increases, saying that "defense spending underpins everything we do" and that "we're not moving as fast as the dangerous world we live in demands."
"We need to do more and we need to do it faster," he stressed. "Today's world is as dangerous as at any time since the Second World War. The years to come will be challenging and NATO must continue to rise to the challenge."
According to alliance statistics, NATO’s combined defense expenditure in 2022 was $1.2 trillion, of which $816 billion came just from the United States. That statistic doesn’t include supplemental spending, such as on military aid to Ukraine, which in the US totaled over $100 billion by itself, or other items such as nuclear weapons maintenance, which is not included in military budget totals.
Stoltenburg said that even if the conflict in Ukraine ended immediately, “the security environment has changed for the long term” and NATO members will need to increase their military budgets regardless.
NATO is now "in the process of agreeing to new capability targets for the production of battle-decisive ammunition and engaging with industry to ramp up production - to support Ukraine against Russia's aggression and for our own defense."
Pointing to a new “strategic concept, the first in a decade, to guide our alliance in an era of strategic competition,” the NATO chief said it “identifies Russia as the most significant threat to our security, along with the ongoing threat of terrorism and makes clear that China challenges our interests, security and values."
The White House first laid out that concept in 2018, calling it “great power competition” as well as “inter-state strategic competition” with Russia and China, and saying the US would have to pivot toward that strategy and away from the War on Terror that had dominated its focus during the first two decades of the 21st century.
While Washington’s analysis has identified China as its biggest threat in the long term and called Russia an “acute” threat, the Europe-centered NATO has focused explicitly on Russia, even while extending feelers to US allies in East Asia to increase cooperation there.
Rights of National Minorities of Ukraine to be Discussed
Stoltenberg’s statement comes amid a controversy over the calling of a meeting of the commission with Ukraine without unanimous support for doing so.
Péter Szijjártó, Hungary’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Economic Relations told reporters on Tuesday following a meeting with Stoltebnerg that the secretary general “said that for various reasons ... he will convene a meeting of the Ukraine- NATO at the ministerial level on April 4-5 during the NATO Council of Foreign Ministers, despite the rejected position of Hungary that the meeting of this commission can only be held with unanimous support.”
While Hungary is a NATO ally, the Central European nation has largely objected to NATO’s enthusiastic support for Ukraine in that country’s conflict with Russia, saying it causes economic chaos across the continent and risks snowballing into a larger war between nuclear powers.
Szijjártó told reporters that Stoltenberg promised that the issue of violations of the rights of national minorities in Ukraine would be discussed at the meeting.
At the initiative of Hungary and Romania, the Council of Europe decided late last year to apply to the Venice Commission about the issue of national minorities in Ukraine, which include Hungarians and Romanians in the Transcarpathian border region. Minorities in the region, which also include Rusyns, have reported being bribed to send their children to learn the Ukrainian language and having their cultural institutions closed by Ukrainian authorities.
Antagonism of non-Ukrainian minorities in the country increased dramatically after the right-wing nationalist coup in 2014, with the moves against Ukraine’s largest minority group, Russians, being the most politically explosive, but with moves against other ethnic groups being no less outrageous. A law that entered force in stages between 2017 and 2020 reduced the ability of members of national minorities to be educated in languages other than Ukrainian, drawing the fury of regional nation-states including Hungary, Romania, and Russia.
Aside from neutralizing Ukraine as a potential base for NATO weapons, Russia's special operation in Ukraine that began in February 2022 is motivated in part by the Ukrainian government's militant assault on Russian-speaking groups in the eastern Donbass region, and neo-Nazi violence there that killed at least 14,000 people between 2014 and 2022. The two people's republics that arose in the Donbass, which have since joined the Russian Federation in the interests of security, initially formed in the Spring of 2014 in response to the anti-Russophone violence sparked by the nationalist coup in Kiev that February.
