Croatia pledges 5% of GDP for defense

Five percent. That is the share of national wealth Croatia now promises to spend on defence by 2035. Prime Minister Andrej Plenković made the pledge to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in Brussels this week, aligning Zagreb with the alliance's new spending benchmark (24sata, NATO). Croatia currently spends just above 2%. Reaching 5% means more than doubling that effort in a decade, a fiscal gamble with no public roadmap attached.

What 5% actually means

The new NATO target breaks into 3.5% of GDP for core defence (armed forces, equipment, operations) and up to 1.5% for defence-related resilience: critical infrastructure, cyber, civil preparedness and defence-industrial capacity (NATO, Evening Standard). The old benchmark, 2% of GDP, was a political guideline first set in 2006 and reaffirmed after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014. It was never legally binding, and the new target works the same way: alliance peer pressure, not court-enforceable obligation (Institute for Government).

That second bucket is where the accounting gets political. Italy claims roughly 2.8% when it counts Carabinieri, coast guard, space and cybersecurity, but specialist analysis puts actual military spending closer to 1.57% (Sky TG24, Analisi Difesa). Slovenia says it reached 2.01% last year; Rutte's position, according to Slovenian media, was that Ljubljana had not met 2% under NATO's own methodology (Svet24, Regional Obala). What a government counts and what NATO accepts are not always the same number.

The southeastern gap

The pledge addresses real capability shortages on NATO's southeastern flank, from the Adriatic through the Balkans to the Black Sea: integrated air and missile defence, counter-drone systems, ammunition stockpiles and logistics corridors for moving allied reinforcements. Rutte and Plenković specifically discussed air and missile defence and Western Balkans security (NATO, 24sata). If Croatian spending buys interoperable systems, it strengthens more than Croatian territory. If it becomes an accounting exercise, the Adriatic-Balkans corridor stays thin.

Poland shows both sides. Warsaw spent about 4.48% of GDP in 2025, making it Europe's proportional defence leader (Euronews). But Poland's Fiscal Council has warned that defence needs after 2028 must be reconciled with budget stability (Rzeczpospolita), and its Supreme Audit Office has challenged how the government classifies military advances in the budget (Bankier). High spending does not automatically mean high readiness. Major deliveries stretch through the decade, and about 40% of European equipment spending reportedly goes to non-EU suppliers (Euronews).

The missing plan

Rutte has demanded "clear, concrete and credible plans" from allies, signalling that summit promises alone will not do (NATO). Croatia has not published one. There is no public year-by-year spending path, no breakdown between core defence and resilience, no procurement list with delivery dates, no map of which industries win the contracts. The pledge gives Croatia political credibility heading into next month's NATO summit, but credibility without a spreadsheet has a short shelf life.

Next month's summit will test whether the pledge produces actual air defence batteries and reinforcement corridors, or just an accounting exercise that counts differently depending on who is looking.