NATO needs “more Britain and more Europe” to cope with the most dangerous security environment the West has faced in a generation, the secretary general of the 32-nation military alliance said this afternoon during a visit to the UK.
Mark Rutte praised Britain for promising to increase defense spending in line with US demands after a meeting with Prime Minister Andy Burnham, but said military and financial efforts must continue into the future.
“It is vital that your armed forces continue to provide the hard power that NATO needs,” Rutte told a dedicated audience at Ditchley Park, the wartime retreat used by Winston Churchill in Oxfordshire.
It was a call for the UK to make progress towards Donald Trump’s alliance-wide target of spending 3.5% of GDP by 2035, or about £30 billion in real terms – money that needs to be found through additional taxes, borrowing or other spending cuts.
Britain has so far only budgeted for an increase in defense spending to 2.7% of GDP by the end of the next decade. Short-term financial pressure led the Army to be ordered to cease non-essential training by the end of the year.
Chancellor John Healey resigned as defense secretary from Keir Starmer’s government in June after the former prime minister failed to commit to a 3% increase by 2030, arguing it would require too much of a leap forward in the next decade.
But Healey refused to confirm the interim target when Burnham appointed him as finance minister a month later, raising doubts that the new government was delaying spending increases until after the next election.
Rutte said he discussed the UK’s “commitments to NATO” when he met Burnham at the Science Business Park in Oxford earlier on Wednesday, without revealing any details, in the first one-on-one meeting between them.
Ahead of that meeting, Burnham acknowledged he was replacing Starmer, but insisted that “there has never been any change in the UK’s unwavering commitment to NATO and our commitments to NATO.”
The NATO chief, a former Dutch prime minister, said many in Europe had made a “casual assumption” that the US would “always provide the majority of the forces and bear the costs no matter what” until Trump returns to the White House.
Instead, he noted that during the 2025 Hague summit, Britain and other alliance members agreed to increase their own defense spending to match US levels, in response to Trump’s demand that Europe take a leading role in defending the continent.
“We need more Britain and more Europe in the alliance,” Rutte said, because NATO “faces the most dangerous and complex security environment in a generation,” with a return to wars in Europe and the Middle East and wider geopolitical uncertainty.
Citing “Russia and its war against Ukraine, terrorism, Iran and the tectonic shifts of global geopolitical competition”, Rutte said the UK and Europe needed to invest more because otherwise “our collective defense will not be credible”.
Britain, he said, had played a “central role in building this stronger Europe in a stronger NATO” and noted that Britain was spending billions to modernize the Trident nuclear deterrent, which is designed to protect NATO members.
Britain is also gradually modernizing its conventional armed forces, although overall UK defense spending, long the second-highest in the alliance, now lags behind Germany. By 2029, Berlin’s military budget is expected to be twice that of the UK.
Britain “led the resistance” to Russia’s campaign of provocation and sabotage across Europe, Rutte said, and that Britain was a “good friend of Ukraine.” The UK spends £3 billion a year supporting Ukraine with weapons.
