OREANDA-NEWS. Presidential Administration of the United States of America intends to reduce payments to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization budget. This was announced on November 27 by CNN channel, citing sources in the US Department of Defense.

Nowadays Washington is financing 22 % of the NATO budget, but the White House intends to reduce this figure to 16 %. American authorities expect other members of the alliance to fill the gap.

“All Allies have agreed a new cost sharing formula. Under the new formula, cost shares attributed to most European Allies and Canada will go up, while the US share will come down. This is an important demonstration of Allies’ commitment to the Alliance and to fairer burden-sharing,” a NATO official told CNN.

The United States will transfer the savings to finance a number of security programs in Europe. Among them are programs in Ukraine and Georgia.

It is noted that this reduction can be called a symbolic step, since the direct budget of NATO, which goes mainly to support the organization’s headquarters and investments in some projects, is relatively small – about 2.5 billion dollars. It is separated from the national defense budgets of the alliance members, which, as NATO recommends, should be 2 % of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

In 2014, NATO member countries agreed to bring military spending above 2 % of GDP during ten years. Currently, only eight members of the military bloc spend more than 2 % on defense. The US military budget is about 3.58 % of GDP, in Germany it is 1.2 %.

In January 2019, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that member states will contribute 100 billion dollars to the budget of the military alliance by the end of 2020.