For more than a decade, NATO’s burden-sharing debate revolved around a number. Washington asked European allies to spend more; European governments argued over how quickly they could get there. Success was measured as a share of GDP. Now the money is arriving—and that is about to make the politics more complicated, not less.
At July’s Ankara Summit, NATO said European allies and Canada had increased investment in core defence requirements by more than $139 billion in 2025 and announced more than $50 billion in new procurement. The Alliance also launched mechanisms to connect firms with procurement opportunities and unused manufacturing capacity. The emphasis has shifted from persuading allies to spend to turning that spending into weapons, production lines and technological capacity.
The scale is substantial. The International Institute for Strategic Studies expects NATO members in Europe to spend about $639 billion on defence in 2026, with 36.2 per cent of their budgets going to investment, up from 24.8 per cent in 2020. IISS also estimates that major procurement contracts signed by European NATO members between February 2022 and July 2025 exceeded $245 billion—almost double the comparable pre-war period.
Those figures describe more than rearmament. They describe a redistribution of industrial power inside the Alliance.
A defence contract does not merely buy a missile, aircraft or radar. It can determine who controls maintenance, software, upgrades, ammunition, technical standards and intellectual property for decades. Once armed forces organise training, supply chains and operational doctrine around particular systems, changing suppliers becomes costly and slow. Procurement therefore creates more than export revenue: it creates dependencies that give producing states influence over capabilities on which other allies rely. Today’s procurement decisions help determine tomorrow’s leverage.
This is why NATO’s next burden-sharing argument may increasingly concern not only contributions, but the distribution of the benefits those contributions create: who builds, who supplies, who gains technology and who becomes dependent on whom.
Europe is already moving in that direction. Of the more than $245 billion in major contracts tracked by IISS since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, about 53 per cent went to European systems and 36 per cent to US equipment. The EU’s defence-industrial strategy encourages member states to move towards procuring at least 50 per cent of their defence budgets inside the EU by 2030 and 60 per cent by 2035.
That creates a subtle transatlantic tension. NATO’s Ankara declaration calls for removing defence-trade barriers among allies and deepening transatlantic industrial cooperation. The EU, meanwhile, wants Europe’s historic surge in defence spending to strengthen European factories, supply chains and technological sovereignty.
At stake are two different definitions of solidarity. NATO’s logic suggests that allies contributing to collective defence should benefit from an open allied industrial base. The EU increasingly treats defence procurement as an instrument of European industrial policy and strategic autonomy. Both seek a stronger European pillar, but differ over where its economic and technological dividends should accrue.
There may therefore be two maps of NATO: a military map of 32 allies, and an industrial map whose boundaries are far less clear.
Canada offers a revealing example. In June, it became the first non-European country to formally participate in the EU’s €150 billion SAFE procurement instrument. Canada was already a NATO ally; it nevertheless needed a separate agreement to secure deeper access to an emerging European procurement framework. Military alliance membership and industrial access are becoming different currencies.
Türkiye may be an even more instructive case. Its NATO debate has long treated burden-sharing as more than a spending question. Defence access, procurement restrictions, sanctions, technology transfer, industrial cooperation and equal treatment all shape perceptions of whether contribution is matched by reciprocal benefit. Türkiye may therefore be an early indicator of a question other allies will increasingly ask: what does alliance membership entitle a country to inside the defence-industrial system?
Canada and Türkiye point towards a wider problem. NATO membership does not automatically confer equal access to every industrial framework through which rearmament is being organised. As European defence policy becomes more institutionalised, allies may discover that military and industrial membership overlap without being identical. Ursula von der Leyen made that boundary visible in Ankara when she noted that, under SAFE, 35 per cent of relevant procurement value can remain open to cooperation with partners such as Türkiye. The issue is not straightforward exclusion, but the terms on which allies gain access to production, technology and procurement opportunities.
NATO itself appears alert to the risk. Its new Strategy for Industry-NATO Cooperation promises openness, inclusiveness and equal opportunity for allied industry. The NATO Front Door for Industry and NATO Engine are intended to widen access and connect production capacity across Europe, Canada and the United States. The test will be whether these mechanisms genuinely broaden participation or merely make established industrial networks more efficient.
This is not an argument for dividing contracts by political quota. NATO needs scale, speed and proven suppliers. But industrial concentration has political consequences. If governments devote historically large shares of national wealth to defence, they will eventually ask what remains at home besides the bill: production capacity, high-value jobs, secure supply chains, technology and influence over future capability choices.
For years, burden-sharing meant distributing the costs of collective defence. Rearmament is increasingly about distributing something more consequential: power.
The next NATO dispute may therefore emerge after spending targets are met, not before. Hundreds of billions of dollars are moving from budgets into factories. Those investments will determine which industries gain scale, which technologies become standards and which allies depend on others when the next crisis comes.
NATO has learned how to ask who pays. Its next challenge is ensuring that allies can live with the answer to a harder question: who builds?
