Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney defended his country’s NATO commitments after being pressed over alliance spending by President , insisting Ottawa meets the benchmark â even though Canada only reached the 2% defense target in 2025.
Speaking recently at a press conference in Monteregie, Quebec, Carney said Iran remains a “grave threat” to the Middle East and beyond and argued Canada is meeting its obligations to the alliance.
But Canada only reached NATOs 2% defense spending benchmark in 2025, after spending years well below the target. Carney acknowledged Ottawa had not hit that mark since the Cold War, underscoring the vulnerability in his pushback to Trump.
“Ill underscore that just a few weeks ago that we’ve met for the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall our NATO commitments in terms of 2% defense spending,” Carney added.Â
Trump has blasted some NATO allies over what he sees as weak support during the Iran conflict, warning on Truth Social that the alliance “wasnt there when we needed them and they wont be there if we need them again.”
When a reporter pressed that Trump threatened to punish NATO, including conflict-averse members Germany and Spain, Carney boasted that Canada “meet[s] its NATO commitments.”
NATOs 2014-2025 defense expenditure report estimated Canadas defense spending at 1.01% of GDP in 2014, and below 1.5% through 2024 before reaching 2.01% in 2025.
Meanwhile, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has praised Trump for pushing allies to meet the 2% benchmark, as several Eastern Bloc nations have noticeably increased their tithes.
Over the past decade, U.S. defense spending has averaged roughly 3.3% of GDP, compared with about 1.3% for Canada. The U.S. GDP is also a higher gross figure than all other NATO members in dollars.
Greece and the U.K. have been the top two countries consistently contributing to NATOs funding, while Canada, Spain, Belgium, the Czech Republic and Hungary all sit in the lower tier on average. The only outlier below them is Luxembourg, which contributes an average 0.6% of GDP to NATO, according to calculations made from the reports figures.
Rutte previously made waves for appearing to refer to Trump as “daddy,” but the Dutch-to-English translation was flawed and that he meant to refer to the president as a strong disciplinarian-like figure at a time when Trump was angry at both .
“In Dutch, you would say the translation of your father is daddy and I would say hey, yeah, some time, Daddy has to be angry, so I wasnt going to say [hes my] daddy,” he said of a meeting between the two men in The Hague last June.
Rutte issued the response after being pressed on whether he still viewed Trump as “Daddy” or an ally amid the presidents issues with some member-nations.
