Britain’s Baltic defense club falls flat on military spending pledge

TALLINN — A summit of a British-led grouping of Nordic and Baltic countries failed to offer much clarity on a defense spending target on Tuesday, with the United Kingdom’s Keir Starmer getting the blame.

“Public finances are not in a good place in the United Kingdom,” the British prime minister said at a Monday evening event in Tallinn before a private debate among leaders. He declined to set out a timeline for when his government would hit its promise to spend 2.5 percent of gross domestic product on defense.

That’s not what the summit of the 10-country Joint Expeditionary Force, founded by the U.K. a decade ago, wanted to hear.

“Increasing defense expenditure is probably everybody’s position in JEF right now,” said Kristen Michal, the prime minister of Estonia, following a more than two-hour meeting Tuesday among heads of government, adding that the “exact figures and push” will happen at next year’s NATO summit in the Netherlands.

Military spending is at the top of the agenda for the grouping — which includes Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as well as the Nordic countries of Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland and the U.K. and the Netherlands. All but four countries have maritime or land borders with Russia.

All members of the grouping bar Iceland meet NATO’s target of spending at least 2 percent of GDP on defense, but there is pressure to go higher.

Estonia’s Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur told media on Monday that urgency was needed to ramp up defense spending. “We don’t have time to wait to go up to 3 percent or even to 2.5 percent,” he said. “We need to do it immediately.”

Estonia will introduce a dedicated tax on company profits and employees next year to finance an ammunition spending splurge, and is heading for 3.7 percent of GDP spending on defense in 2026. Pevkur said taxation was one way to raise the capital needed to fund military procurement.

That kind of full-throttle ambition isn’t for everyone.

“My friend, I warn against this kind of decision-making,” Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre told POLITICO ahead of the leaders’ meeting. “I’m not coming in and committing in a statement to a figure … that’s a serious thing you have to plan and commit to in your budget planning.”

Norway plans to spend 2.1 percent of GDP on defense next year.

Støre will host the next JEF meeting in Oslo in May, just weeks before the NATO meeting in The Hague.

With Donald Trump returning to the White House in January, NATO’s new Secretary-General Mark Rutte says the alliance needs to consider a return to Cold War-era levels of spending with fresh targets expected to land at next summer’s summit.

Either 2.5 percent of GDP, or even 3 percent, are the touted options.

British bluster

Criticism of Britain’s leadership of the JEF club was clear.

At an appearance in Tallinn, Starmer excused himself from the Q&A part of a Monday evening debate with Estonia’s Michal and Norway’s Støre, then was seen roaming in the venue’s lobby with aides leaving the two leaders to take questions from the floor.

“The Nordic and Baltic states are crying out for more U.K. leadership,” said Ed Arnold from the Royal United Services Institute think tank, adding the “the agenda was unambitious” with a “lack of urgency.”

The British-led JEF grouping was set up in 2014 at NATO’s summit in Wales and designed as a trip wire to respond to any conflict in the Baltic region. It was also a convenient platform for patching in Sweden and Finland before they joined NATO.

A decade later, Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine has turned the group into an all-NATO team of some of Kyiv’s big backers. This year, the 10 countries combined will provide Kyiv with over €12 billion in aid. Germany has pledged €7 billion for this year.

Dialing in to the JEF meeting by videoconference, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on allies to deliver on their pledges to send more air defense systems to Ukraine. Kyiv needs an extra 12 to 15 platforms, he said.

Despite Starmer’s caution on a defense spending pledge, the U.K. is leading a NATO battle group in Estonia and has pledged to have thousands more troops ready for rapid deployment to the Baltics if needed.

That commitment prompted Michal to defend JEF as a useful talking shop.

“JEF should be a much more agile responder than other formats, that’s what it’s for,” Michal told POLITICO after the leaders’ meeting, adding that it could well be expanded to share intelligence and counter hybrid threats. “JEF is working quite well to be honest.”