Europe is belatedly responding to President Donald Trump’s call for much increased defense spending on the continent. Trump wants NATO member states to spend 5% of GDP on defense (a higher allotment than the United States, which spent 3.4% of GDP on defense in 2024). While Trump fails to recognize how the NATO defensive alliance benefits America’s prosperity and security, he understands that alliances cannot be sustained without fair burden-sharing.

Unfortunately, the Canadians and too many European NATO nations aren’t moving quickly enough to get their defense budgets where they need to be. They are reluctant to make cuts to their expansive welfare states to allocate more funds to defense. Instead, they are increasingly focused on using gimmicks to claim higher-than-accurate, top-line percentages of GDP defense budgets. Their poor example stands in stark contrast to the leadership of Poland.