NATO Summit: Government working on defence spending. Further increases are being considered (but there is little room for manoeuvre)

The NATO target of 5 per cent by 2035 is a long way off, and not just in terms of time. But Italia has committed to maintaining a growth trajectory, and Giorgia Meloni will confirm this at the Ankara summit on Tuesday and Wednesday, where she will present defence spending at 2.8 per cent of GDP, with an increase of 0.71 per cent driven mainly by expenditure on internal security, in line with the multi-domain approach on which the Prime Minister will emphasise. According to some government sources, the commitments for the future could reach +0.3 per cent in 2027 and +0.6 per cent in 2028. The increase could amount to a total of 17–18 billion euros. However, these are variable percentages, other government sources point out, explaining that scenarios for an increase over a two-year or three-year period are being considered.

There is no shortage of variables, and the final say will in any case rest with Meloni. The decision is a political one, and also concerns the reallocation of expenditure between purely defence-related budget headings and those linked to internal security, for which the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allows a share of up to 1.5 per cent within the 5 per cent limit. This is a sensitive issue, all the more so because the ruling coalition has effectively entered a prolonged election campaign, and the subject of military spending is considered unpopular. It is no coincidence that SAFE loans will not be sought, at least not until 2026; discussions on the PURL (the system for purchasing American arms to be passed on to Ukraine) have been put on hold; and no new military supply packages for Kyiv are on the horizon.

The Ankara summit will be shorter than previous ones. In the interests of efficiency, the host country, Turkey, has limited the leaders’ programme to an official dinner on Tuesday evening and a plenary session the following morning. This could reduce the scope for Donald Trump’s unpredictable behaviour, as well as the chances of bilateral meetings. A meeting with Meloni is not currently on the agenda. However, any contact between the two will be closely watched following the tensions of recent weeks. In the background, there is also the scaling back of US presence in Europe. “I don’t see any changes on the horizon,” said Ambassador Tilman J. Fertitta, referring to the presence at Italian bases. “The NATO summit in Ankara was organised to ensure everything goes smoothly,” explained Defence Minister Guido Crosetto, who will be in Ankara alongside Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani. “Commitments will be honoured; every country is attending having completed part of the journey it said it intended to undertake. So I don’t foresee any more problems from this perspective than we had at the last summit. As for what Trump will say or do, we’ll have to wait and see. This will be a very short summit; I think it will be over in three or four hours.”

In recent months, Crosetto has been insisting within the Government on the need to increase defence spending, emphasising that this is an investment rather than a cost. ‘We have said that we are not in a position to meet the spending target required by NATO straight away,’ explained the minister. ‘Let’s set 2035 as our target date; in the meantime, let’s see if the global situation improves. Perhaps we might be able to adjust this target in some way, but in the meantime we have taken action. If you want to be part of this alliance, you must honour the commitments you have made, and that is simply what I have been reminding people of over the last few days.”