Media Contact 202-321-9747

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, House Foreign Affairs Europe Subcommittee Chairman Keith Self delivered opening remarks at a subcommittee hearing titled, “Assessing the Challenges Facing NATO.”

Watch Here

-Remarks-

The purpose of this hearing is to provide members with an informed perspective of the U.S. policy toward NATO and an opportunity to discuss NATO’s trajectory in advance of the June summit in The Hague. I now recognize myself for an opening statement.

The Hague will be focused on funding for NATO, This first chart […] shows the NATO nations. They, they are listed top to bottom by GDP. They are listed on the right side by the percentage that they provide.

Of course, the U.S. is at the top with Almost $29 trillion in GDP then you go down to Germany, UK, France, Italy, Canada, and Spain. Down here you’ve got the frontline countries you’ve got Lithuania, you’ve got Latvia, you’ve got Estonia. Uh, some of the Balkan countries are down below. The ones that I want to point out. The summit tells us that they are going to be going above 3% somewhere.

I want to point out right here we have got some the major economies in NATO — specifically France, Italy, Canada [and Spain] — that are well below […] their current 2% commitment. These are major economies. This is a major change that needs to happen at the summit.

 Now just a couple of comparisons. This compares Poland to everyone else on the Eastern Flank, the eastern flank being defined as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Poland has a GDP of about 840 billion dollars, eastern flank is 890, so they’re not dissimilar. The defense budgets are quite a bit disimilar.

Their percentage though Poland is at over 4% currently and going higher. The Eastern Flank is a 2.36 and going higher and has already committed to go higher.

And one more just to give you an idea of where the funding in NATO. stands, this is Germany versus the Eastern Flank, so we’ve added Poland to the East of Germany. So Germany has the 4.6, the Eastern Flank has 1.7. Here are the defense budgets. The Eastern Flank is providing a higher percentage than Germany is.

So, my point in all of these three slides is [that] there is work to do in the summit later this month. Now I know that people have made commitments, but what you just saw were 2024, the last year we had a full year’s funding toward NATO. That is, that is a major problem that I wanted to highlight. We’ve got other issues in this, in this briefing, but that’s the one that I wanted to start with. The first thing we have to start with is everyone pulling their weight in NATO.

###