The 5% number is fudged, much of the increase over 2% comes from civic infrastructure investment. They’re fluffing the numbers.

Most EU defense spending isn’t on US equipment (only ~35%); I don’t get where the European victim mentality is coming from here - Europe can and is building up its own defense industry.

There’s some Trump nonsense more recently about buy American, but the demands to take security seriously have been going on for nearly 20 years, and have been largely ignored until Ukraine round two.

> I don’t get where the European victim mentality is coming from here

It’s coming from the fact that we’re already in a difficult time with a slowdown in economy and then get bullied into spending the money we could be using to help our own people on new US weapons.

All for Trump to then sign half of Ukraine off to Russia.