Canada’s Five Per Cent Defence Pledge Isn’t About Trump, It’s About Staying Relevant in NATO

At the 2025 NATO summit in The Hague in June, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made a historic announcement: Canada, along with other NATO allies, would commit to spending five per cent of its GDP on defence by 2035. It is the country’s most ambitious military development since the Second World War.

Back in office for a second term, US President Donald Trump took the new NATO target as proof that America’s allies had finally “stepped up” after accusations of freeloading. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte acknowledged Trump’s role in shifting the alliance’s spending culture, noting that he was “totally right” about the imbalance.

However, this move contains a deeper paradox, one which reveals more than the surface-level performance of alliance politics. For Canada and many other NATO members, the five per cent pledge goes beyond satisfying Trump: it is about hedging against him and the broader instability of a fragmented global order. Although it appears to be complying with Trump’s demands, Canada is, in reality, investing in its long-term sovereignty. In the age of multipolar competition, middle powers like Canada are learning that the path to autonomy runs through multilateral entanglement, not isolation.

Trump’s return to the White House in January reignited anxieties within NATO. In his first term, Trump openly questioned the alliance’s relevance, floated the idea of withdrawing from collective defence obligations, and brought a hostile attitude to the negotiating table at NATO summits. His second term has continued this trend. As Trump celebrates NATO’s new spending targets, he continues to treat security guarantees as conditional transactions rather than mutual commitments.

Canada’s five per cent pledge is, in part, a strategic concession to this reality. By allocating more funding to mutual defence, Ottawa shields itself from accusations of freeloading and appeases Trump in a straightforward, surface-level way. However, a deeper strategy is at play. Carney’s government is working within Trump’s framework now to help ensure the alliance’s stability later. The five per cent pledge is as much about buying time and credibility as it is ramping up Canada’s defence posture.

Canada’s move is not happening in isolation. Across Europe, rearmament has become the norm since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Poland now spends over four per cent of its GDP on defence, the Baltic states are above three per cent, and Germany, France, and the UK, among others, have all signed on to the five per cent target.

What sets the new spending pledge apart is its structure. NATO leaders have agreed to divide the five per cent into two categories: first, three-and-a-half per cent on core military capabilities, including submarines and fighter jets, as well as cyberwarfare programs and Arctic patrols. Second, one-and-a-half per cent is to be spent on broader defence-adjacent infrastructure, including critical minerals, port expansions, aerospace technology, telecommunications resilience, and emergency preparedness.

For Canada, this mix is crucial. Carney has emphasized that the investment will be “net-additive“—going towards industrial and economic development, in addition to military buildup. Spending on drones, icebreakers, and aerospace innovation will create domestic jobs, and infrastructure funding will help move critical minerals from Canada’s northern territories to global markets, supporting both security interests and economic diversification. Thus, this is not merely a defence pledge, but also a national industrial strategy.

Critics of the pledge, including University of Calgary Professor Alexander Hill, argue that Canada’s growing NATO commitments represent not autonomy but capitulation to political pressure and inflated threat narratives. Hill points to the lack of evidence for an immediate Russian threat to Canada or Europe, and warns that rising military spending may divert funds from health, education, and social programs. However, in the current geopolitical context, the opposite may be true. Multilateralism—the active participation in cooperative institutions to shape shared rules and outcomes—is how middle powers, such as Canada, protect their autonomy. By investing more in NATO, Canada is doing more than following orders from Washington—it is building the credibility required to shape the alliance’s future direction. This is especially important as American leadership becomes increasingly erratic. Trump’s return has already triggered a new trade war with Canada, demonstrating that even close allies are not exempt from economic coercion. In such an environment, Canada must play hardball, using military credibility not as an end in itself, but as leverage to defend its broader strategic interests.

Carney’s government has signed new defence-industrial partnerships with the EU and is negotiating further supply chain agreements with the US. The goal of these arrangements is to secure Canada’s place in the transatlantic security ecosystem, ensuring it has a say in how future conflicts, crises, and technologies are managed. In this light, defence development becomes a form of sovereignty insurance. The logic is clear: in a multipolar world, mid-sized democracies must take the lead in building the frameworks they wish to inhabit. Otherwise, those frameworks will be shaped by legitimacy-hungry allies, or collapse into a vacuum where disorder thrives.

The five per cent pledge signals more than a shift in defence policy. It reflects a broader bet on what the global order will look like in the coming decades. Like many of its allies, Canada is preparing for a world in which alliances are transactional, supply chains are weaponized, and democratic norms are challenged not only by rival states but by a rising ideology of techno-authoritarianism. In a 2024 article, Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic, argues that Silicon Valley elites have cultivated a political worldview—rooted in scale, speed, and surveillance — that bypasses democratic accountability in favour of engineering society from above. This ideology increasingly influences national policy, especially in the US, where figures like Vice President JD Vance fuse populist suspicion of alliances with techno-authoritarian disdain for institutional constraint. Canada’s defence pivot, by contrast, is less a capitulation to this ideology than a hedge against it. It is an attempt to reinforce multilateral norms and democratic coordination before they are eclipsed by technological dominance and unilateral power.

In this environment, sovereignty is no longer secured by geography or legacy treaties, but by the ability to shape the technological, military, and industrial systems which underpin global power. The five per cent target, then, is not appeasement. It is a strategic investment in capacity, resilience, and influence. When the cost of inaction is irrelevance, Canada’s decision to ramp up defence spending is not submission, it is survival.

Edited by Liam Murphy

Featured Image: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney meets with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at the G7 summit in June 2025. Photo by NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0