The NATO summit that ended in Brussels yesterday will be remembered most of all for the turmoil caused by US President Donald Trump’s demand for a rise in national military spending from 2 to 4 percent of the respective country’s GDP. At NATO, the issue is sensitive enough with a 2 percent target level of defence expenditures, and the idea of doubling the sum plunged the meeting into bewilderment and disarray. As the dust settled, President Trump denied having threatened the US would leave NATO, and any discussion of a rise in the defence budget norm from 2 to 4 percent was left for a later, unspecified time.

There was no way the Bulgarian delegation could have been left out of the fracas, and the position it took was, on the whole, predictable, comparable to the positions of many other allies, and can only be described as guarded. President Rumen Radev who headed the delegation commented that “enhancing the defence capability of any country should not take place, or be perceived as external duress, but should be an acknowledged necessity.” And added that by a decision of the Consultative Council on National Security, the national plan to reach 2 percent of the GDP for defence is to be reviewed in September.

At the meeting of the defence ministers of the allies that took place as part of the Brussels summit, Bulgaria’s Defence Minister Krasimir Karakachanov stated that according to the executive branch in Bulgaria, the specific dimensions of the national contribution to NATO should be in compliance with the rates of implementation of the projects for the modernization of the country’s armed forces. Some difficult decisions were made in the past few months with regard to this modernization, and they concern the army, the navy and the air force, but its parameters are, as yet, not entirely clear.

It should be noted that the positions Bulgaria formulated at the NATO summit in Brussels were not ad hoc or resulting from the tensions surrounding the question of military budgets, they were well thought out and had even been expressed publicly at other international forums. For example, at the informal meeting of EU defence ministers in Sofia at the beginning of May during the Bulgarian Presidency of the Council of the EU, PM Boyko Borissov commented that the NATO requirement that every member country should spend 2 percent of its GDP seemed excessive. As he put it, if 2 percent of the GDP really is spent on defence by all allies, then the sum for armament would swell to trillions, and there was no need for every country to “buy by the kilo at the counter.” And the reason for Minister Karakachanov to state in Brussels that the national contribution to NATO should be in compliance with the rates of implementation of the projects for the modernization of Bulgaria’s armed forces, is that in May, in Sofia, PM Borissov proposed that a thorough analysis be made of what would be a priority for each individual country. Going back even further, in 2015 Borissov took up the idea of smart defence, in which case NATO and the EU shall seek a precise balance between the capacities of national budgets, with the enhancement of military capabilities being shared among the allies, instead of being pursued individually. And it’s not about sharing ideas among NATO members, but about money, and Bulgaria’s modest financial capabilities. Because the powers that be in Bulgaria know very well that the 3.5 billion Leva /1.79 billion euro/ now earmarked for the modernization of the armed forces may well prove to be an impossible financial burden on the national economy even though compared to the target armed forces capacity, it is an overly modest sum.

English version: Milena Daynova