During a meeting of NATO Ministers' Ukraine Defense Contact Group, newly appointed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth supported President Donald Trump's calls for European allies to raise their defense spending to a minimum of 5% of their GDP, rather than the current target of 2%.

He said that the latter amount is “not enough” for adequate defense investment.

Hegseth emphasized that the U.S. “remains committed to the NATO alliance and to the defense partnership with Europe. Full stop. But the United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency.”

Noting that "NATO is a great alliance, the most successful defense alliance in history," Hegseth said that for it to endure, partners must do far more for Europe's defense.

"Our expectation of our friends — and we say this in solidarity — is you have to spend more on your defense, for your country, on that continent, understanding that the American military and the American people stand beside you, as we have in NATO," he added.

Only 35% of NATO countries meet the group’s current 3% spending target.

In 2024, the percentage of GDP spent on defense varies widely across NATO member countries.

Whereas the U.S. has typically committed about 3.5% of its GDP to defense over the past decade, only Poland (4.1%), Estonia (3.4%), Latvia (3.2%), and Greece (3.1%) have chipped in that amount.

Situated in a crucial geopolitical location in Central Europe, Poland has increased its military spending in recent years primarily due to concerns about escalating instability along the country’s eastern border with Belarus.

Despite being on the 2% list, the U.K. reduced the percentage spent in recent years from 2.14% in 2014 to an estimated 2.07% in 2023.

Ironically, significant economic and military powers are among the members’ biggest military tightwads, including France (1.9%), Italy (1.5%), and Canada (1.4%).

Germany, possessing the largest European economy, spends only 1.6% of its GDP on defense.

If you imagined that Germany’s substantial GDP largess would make it most readily able to pay more of its fair share on NATO defense, perhaps think again.

In fact, the country is in the middle of a self-inflicted economic crisis driven by one of the world’s highest energy prices.

Average German households paid 39.5-euro cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity in 2024, compared with 32.1 in Britain, 27.8 in France and 14.9 in the U.S.

Midsize German industrial users pay 24.8-euro cents per kilowatt hour, better than Britain’s 46.4 but much worse than France’s 16.7 or America’s 7.4. (A euro cent is worth slightly more than a U.S. cent.)

Blame much of this price pain on a “green energy” transition that’s been underway for some 20 years as the country has steadily removed affordable mainstays such as coal from its power mix, while also phasing out dependable nuclear power.

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine made matters worse. Germany’s economy had come to rely heavily on cheap Russian natural gas to offset energy shortages, a stopgap they could no longer count on, contributing to two years of recession and accelerating deindustrialization.

Meanwhile, former President Joe Biden banned U.S. exports of liquid natural gas (LNG) which might have helped them out, a prohibition that President Donald Trump has since fortunately reversed.

Nonetheless, German Green leader Robert Habeck, the minister for economy and climate change, argues the green transition hasn’t been aggressive enough, and promises heftier taxpayer subsidies for an even faster renewable build-out.

This, after former finance minister Christian Lindner had published a paper arguing that Germany’s climate policies were nuts and that Berlin needs a wholesale reappraisal of the (big) costs and (overstated) benefits of a green transition.

That energy transition was launched by former Chancellor Angela Merkel who started the country’s exit from nuclear power in 2011 which initiated an energy network surcharge — currently around 30% of household electricity bills needed to pay for the enormous cost of building a grid suitable for intermittent renewables.

A resounding public wakeup call came in the form of a 2023 top constitutional court order mandating that government climate spending must be paid and accounted for on a balance sheet rather than hidden via off-balance borrowing as before.

This meant that if the government wanted to continually fund the green transition, it would need either to raise new revenue or to seek and implement offsetting spending cuts elsewhere.

Adding grief to misery and peril to pain, a German electric vehicle mandate is not only transferring more energy demand to the electric grid but depleting auto workers’ lunchboxes as well. Volkswagen, whose 2024 third-quarter year-over-year after-tax profit fell 64% is considering closing three factories, axing 10,000 jobs, and slashing pay for those who remain employed.

Similarly, Britain’s Labour Party government has announced plans to scale back its 100% green electricity pledge made last summer along with its EV mandate.

The International Energy Agency’s latest data (from 2022) indicates that increased solar and wind power generation costs across 70 countries have yielded 12 cents per kilowatt-hour higher average energy costs.

It appears that citizens of more and more countries are beginning to realize that renewable energy doesn’t come free.

Who knows, maybe the general U.S. population will learn from their lessons and finally wise up too.

Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.