NATO’s claim that all its members reached their 2% defence spending goal in 2025 has been disputed by research institute SIPRI, which also warned on Monday that nebulous definitions of what constitutes defence spending could lead to “creative accounting”.
The military alliance estimated last year that its members reached the 2% spending target but SIPRI said that it believes only 23 of the 32 NATO members actually managed to attain that threshold.
“NATO members have a strong political incentive to demonstrate their commitment to the alliance, potentially through inflated figures, given the uncertainty in the alliance from the US ally,” SIPRI researcher Jade Guiberteau Ricard told Euractiv.
One example cited by the research institute is Italy.
It calculated that Rome spent €41.1 billion on its defence – close to the NATO number of €41.7 billion – but according to Ricard, “the amount of ‘other expenditures’ fitting NATO’s definition but not SIPRI’s has been increasing since 2022 up to €5.6 billion in 2025”. Läs artikel