Nato: Who’s spending what?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 13 March 2024
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Wary of the perceived threat from Russia, the countries that make up the Nato Western military alliance are upping their spending on the military. But not fast enough, according to former US president Donald Trump, who has made the issue part of his election campaign.
So should governments in Europe be spending more on their collective defence? Do Europeans want them to, or would they rather that money go to things like education and healthcare instead?
As Sweden joins the alliance, we look at who is spending what within Nato, who is pulling their weight, and who is not.
We speak to people across Europe about what they want, and we talk to one former army chief, who says his country is woefully underprepared to defend itself.
Presenter/producer: Gideon Long Additional reporting from Bethany Bell, BBC correspondent in Vienna And additional recording by Maddy Savage in Stockholm and Kostas Kallergis in Brussels
(Photo: German Eurofighter Typhoon jets of TLG73 during Nato exercise. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, Namulanta Combo here with some very exciting news. |
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| 0:13.2 | That's Dear Daughter from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:16.6 | Find it wherever you get your BBC podcasts. |
| 0:22.1 | Hello, I'm Gideon Long and welcome to Business Daily. |
| 0:25.5 | Today, how much should countries spend to defend their borders? |
| 0:29.5 | We're looking at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. |
| 0:33.4 | When you talk to NATO planners, a lot of them will say, actually, defense spending in NATO has gone up significantly. |
| 0:41.2 | But it's still 18 countries are meeting it great. What about the rest? |
| 0:44.7 | U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump has made military spending one of his rallying cries, |
| 0:49.8 | insisting that Europe contribute more to its own defense. |
| 0:53.5 | But how do Europeans feel, |
| 0:55.2 | do they want their governments to spend more on weapons? I mean, NATO, yeah, it's great. I love it. |
| 1:00.9 | Good for the army so we can protect ourselves for Russia. |
| 1:04.0 | For me, spending money on defence is something not that worthy, and we should spend that money |
| 1:09.9 | to other things. |
| 1:16.4 | That's the future of NATO military spending here on Business Daily from the BBC World Service. |
| 1:24.2 | NATO was busted until I came along. I said everybody's going to pay. They said, well, if we don't pay, |
| 1:28.2 | are you still going to protect us? I said, absolutely not. They couldn't believe the answer. |
| 1:31.7 | Donald Trump at a rally in South Carolina last month. |
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