The morning of July 3, ahead of this week's NATO summit in Ankara, President Trump posted a ranking to Truth Social to make his case that the United States pays for the alliance and gets nothing back. He listed defense spending from 2014 to 2025: the US at 999 billion dollars, the United Kingdom at 90.5 billion, France at 66.5 billion, Italy at 48.8 billion, and Poland at 44.3 billion. "Others, including Germany, are MUCH LOWER," he wrote. "Ridiculous!" [1]
The list is checkable, and it fails in two places. Start with Germany, the country Trump singled out as spending far less. By NATO's own accounting, Germany spent 93.7 billion dollars on defense in 2025 - more than the United Kingdom's 90.5 billion, and more than every other ally on Trump's list [2]. Germany was not the laggard. It was the biggest European spender he named, which is the opposite of what he said.
Data
| Germany | 93.7 billions of dollars |
|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 90.5 billions of dollars |
| France | 66.5 billions of dollars |
| Italy | 48.8 billions of dollars |
| Poland | 44.3 billions of dollars |
The second error is his own headline number. Trump put US defense spending at 999 billion dollars; NATO's official 2025 estimate for the United States is about 980 billion [2]. His figure overstates it by roughly 19 billion - a rounding choice in the wrong direction on the one number meant to carry the whole argument.
The deeper problem is what the ranking measures. These are each country's own national defense budgets, the money they spend on their own armed forces - not payments to NATO. The United States does not send 980 billion dollars to the alliance; its share of NATO's common budget is about one seventh, the same as Germany's, a point we walked through in the flagship on Trump's 'no benefit' claim. The allies are not standing still either: European members plus Canada invested about 571 billion dollars in 2025, up roughly 20 percent in a single year [3].
A president is free to argue that allies should spend more. The argument does not need invented numbers, and Trump's has two: an inflated US total, and a Germany that leads the list he said it trailed.
