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| NATO’s secretary-general has called on Europe to increase its defence spending |
THIS graph shows how some of the wealthiest countries in the world are neglecting a NATO target to spend at least 2 per cent of their GDP on defence.
America currently
funds around three-quarters of the alliance's operations and the
election of Donald Trump has thrown the deficit among European members
into sharp relief.
NATO's secretary-general has called on Europe to pledge an increase in defence spending to save the 28-member bloc.
Only
five out of 28 members of the military alliance meet the NATO spending
requirement - the UK, Poland, Greece and Estonia and the US.
But almost
two-dozen countries fail to meet that target, with Canada, Spain,
Belgium, Italy and Hungary among the nations barely reaching the one per
cent mark.
US president-elect Mr Trump has led
calls for a more balanced funding structure for the Brussels-based
alliance, which is propped up by Washington.
Mr
Trump said member nations should be kicked out of the transatlantic
partnership unless they agreed to contribute more to its upkeep.
On the campaign
trail in April, he said: "When we're paying and nobody else is really
paying, a couple of other countries are but nobody else is really
paying, you feel like the jerk.
"Its possible that we're going to have to let NATO go."
Amid
rising tensions between Russia and the West, triggered by the
annexation of Crimea and the war in Syria, European allies have begun to
spend more on defence.
Defence spending by
Europe and Canada - but excluding the US - rose 0.6 per cent last year
and is projected to have climbed by 3 per cent by the end of 2016.
Among
the biggest increases have been in the Baltic states, which are deemed
to be at highest risk of an act of Russian aggression.
Latvia
has increased its budget from less than 1 per cent two years ago to
1.45 per cent of GDP this year, while Lithuania has seen a similar
increase.
However, some nations have actually reduced their defence budgets as a share of GDP since 2014.
Among those are France, Turkey, Belgium and Croatia.
In 2015, NATO's
North American allies spent $618 billion on defence, compared with $253
billion for all of the alliance's European member states.
Britain is the second largest spender in the NATO family after the US, devoting more than £40billion to military projects.
That compares with France's £30 billion and Germany's £27 billion.
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