Did Donald Trump’s words spur increases in defense spending among U.S. allies? | McClatchy Washington Bureau

It was the sort of brash, offhand comment that has defined Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign.

During the Wednesday night debate with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, he questioned the wisdom of the United States picking up the defense and security tab for its allies, asking, “Why aren’t they paying?”

He went on to note: “I questioned NATO. Why aren’t the NATO questioned – why aren’t they paying? Because they weren’t paying. Since I did this – this was a year ago – all of a sudden, they’re paying. And I’ve been given a lot – a lot of credit for it. All of a sudden, they’re starting to pay up. They have to pay up. We’re protecting people, they have to pay up. And I’m a big fan of NATO. But they have to pay up.”

Is this claim true? Did Trump help bring about a sea-change in the defense spending habits of NATO allies, or in a broader sense, U.S. allies?

There has been a recent increase in defense spending in some NATO countries. Thursday morning, however, IHS Janes, the London-based global defense industry analyst, issued a report on three NATO allies that indicates the spending increases in those three nations – the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – at least, predate Trump’s entry into the presidential race.

The IHS report suggests the prompting for the increased spending in Europe was the Russian invasion of Crimea, in March 2014.

“Since the Ukraine crisis began, orders for new defense equipment in the Baltics have doubled and will double again in the next two years,” the report notes.

The report listed the combined spending on defense equipment of the three states as having climbed from $210 million in 2014 to $390 million in 2016, with the expectation that their spending will reach $670 million by 2018.

Their total defense budgets are expected to reach 2 percent of their gross domestic product by 2018. Estonia’s was over that bar in 2015, while the other two were at 1.1 percent. NATO recommends that nations spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense, though many fail to reach that level.

In fact, the report notes that “Latvia and Lithuania have been the two fastest-growing defense budgets in the world since 2014.”

As for why that is: “The increase in defense spending in the Baltics is largely linked to the growing confrontation between Russia and the West, often described as the ‘new Cold War,’ ” wrote Alex Kokcharov, an analyst at IHS Country Risk, a part of the company.

Beyond the Baltic states, other nations don’t appear to have been spurred to increase spending by Trump’s words, either.

Germany’s spending is increasing, though that was part of a five-year budget plan adopted before Trump was a candidate, and before his comments on NATO.

The United Kingdom has built a slight increase into its defense budget, though the U.K. has traditionally been one of the few nations to meet the 2 percent of GDP requirement. It is not clear that U.S. politics had any effect on that budget process. The British defense secretary instead noted earlier this year the need to fight the Islamic State.