Funding the alliance

Participants at the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit will agree on concrete plans to increase funding for the alliance's overall budgets. US Assistant to the President for National Security Jacob Jeremiah Sullivan said in a briefing to journalists on Tuesday.

"The alliance will also agree specific targets for increases in overall funding for NATO, for its various budgets, to ensure that all strategic lines of effort reflected in this new strategic concept for the alliance, which will be endorsed at the summit, are fully resourced," Jacob Sullivan said. The briefing was held aboard the plane of US President Joe Biden, who was on his way from Germany to the Spanish capital to attend the aforementioned meeting of NATO leaders.

As Jacob Jeremiah Sullivan recalled, NATO leaders decided back in 2014 at the Wales summit to increase their national defence spending to at least 2% of GDP. According to the US aide, the US expects the upcoming summit to demonstrate that "the vast majority of NATO countries have either met" this target or "are on track to meet it by 2024".

It is worth noting that the NATO heads-of-state meeting is taking place in Madrid on 28-30 June.