Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni met with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday, but the statement issued by Meloni’s office after the meeting made no mention of the NATO chief’s pressure on Italy over low defence spending, with experts saying after the meeting that it is more about how it is spent, not the amount.

Meloni welcomed Stoltenberg in Rome to discuss “current issues of the Atlantic agenda in the context of the preparation for the NATO Summit in Washington in July,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement issued after the meeting, which was not followed by a press conference.

Italy is a loyal and key ally, Stoltenberg told ANSA in an interview on Wednesday, acknowledging the country’s multifaceted contributions to NATO’s missions and describing the meeting as “positive”.

However, the statement from the prime minister’s office makes no mention of NATO’s pressure on Italy to increase its defence spending, which several analysts said was a major point of discussion at the meeting.

Although NATO leaders had agreed in 2014 to spend at least 2% of their respective GDP on defence each year by 2024, in 2022 the government of former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi postponed the deadline to 2028, but in February this year Defence Minister Guido Crosetto announced that “NATO is asking us to advance (the deadline) to 2024.”

Currently, the countries that spend the most on defence relative to GDP are Poland, the United States and Greece, which in 2023 spent more than 3% of their GDP on defence.

Italy, which is currently at the bottom of the list with 1.46%, followed by Canada, Slovenia, Turkey, Spain, Belgium and Luxembourg, has decided to reduce spending to 1.43% in 2024 and 1.45% in 2025, according to the Multiannual Defence Programme document.

“Italy isn’t meeting the 2% threshold, but when it comes to operational contributions, it excels, ranking second or third,” the Director of the NATO Defence College Foundation, Alessandro Politi, told Euractiv Italy in an interview.

However, according to Politi, it is not the amount spent that is important; it is the way it is spent.

“With what little it spends in total, however, it does a lot, and this is fine in stabilisation and crisis management operations. However, it falls short, as almost any other ally, in a high-intensity warfare scenario,” Politi said.

“More than 60% of what Italy spends on defence actually ends up in salaries”, he added, noting that there is a crucial need to be more efficient with spending.

Speaking about efficient spending, Politi also mentioned the example of Germany.

“If you look at the famous €100 billion pledged by Germany, unless they deeply change their armament programmes, they continue investing in things that were suitable in a completely different period when we were involved in peacekeeping interventions,” he said.

According to him, Italy and other NATO members should focus their spending on heavy combat units and ammunition, as this is a common NATO problem, adding that “there are very few studies on how much the United States truly spends on national defence assets in Europe, taking out its global commitments.”

“What we European allies spend automatically benefits NATO because Europe does not have one army for NATO and one for national interests,” Politi said, adding that based on ISS, FPRI and DoD data, the US spends approximately between 0.67 and 0.13% of its GDP in the European theatre as part of NATO.

(Alessia Peretti | Euractiv.it)

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