Britain on Tuesday announced a landmark increase in military spending, seeking to send a powerful signal about burden sharing to President Trump before Prime Minister Keir Starmer meets him at the White House on Thursday.
Mr. Starmer said Britain would raise its military spending to 2.5 percent of economic output by 2027, and to 3 percent during the next government’s term, which would mean by 2034 at the latest. Britain, he said, would pay for the massive new expenditure by scaling back spending on overseas development aid.
The Labour government had already promised to raise expenditure to 2.5 percent of gross domestic product, from a current level of 2.3 percent, but it had not given a date by which it would do so. The move would amount to an increase in expenditure of 13.4 billion pounds ($17 billion) a year on defense between now and 2027.
“We must change our national security posture because a generational challenge demands a generational response,” Mr. Starmer said in a statement to Parliament that won support across the chamber’s political parties.
Mr. Starmer said the government would cut overseas development aid from 0.5 percent of gross domestic product to 0.3 percent, adding that he regretted the reduction. “At times like this, the defense and security of the British people must always come first,” he said.
Mr. Trump has long demanded that European allies contribute more to Europe’s defense. He has asserted erroneously that the United States had provided the large majority of financial support to Ukraine.
But NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, also recently called on NATO members to spend “considerably more” than 3 percent of economic output on defense. Mr. Trump’s recent statements about Ukraine have reinforced fears that the United States is retreating from its decades-long commitment to the defense of Europe.
Mr. Starmer reiterated the centrality of the trans-Atlantic alliance to Europe’s security. That drew a distinction with the likely new chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, who said after his party’s election victory on Sunday that Europe must stake out a security strategy independent of the United States.
“We must reject any false choice between our allies, between one side of the Atlantic or the other,” Mr. Starmer said, saying of Britain and the United States: “It is a special relationship. It is a strong relationship. I want it to go from strength to strength.”
The government’s aid cutback, which came on top of a previous cut under a Conservative prime minister, Boris Johnson, in 2020, echoes the Trump administration’s drastic retreat from foreign aid. But Mr. Starmer presented his decision as a temporary measure necessitated by the challenging new security environment.
Mr. Trump’s billionaire ally Elon Musk has all but dismantled the United States Agency for International Development as part of his overhaul of the federal government through what he calls the Department of Government Efficiency.
In Britain, the chair of the House of Commons international development committee appealed to Mr. Starmer to rethink the decision.
“Cutting the aid budget to fund defense spending is a false economy that will only make the world less safe,” the committee chair, Sarah Champion, said, adding that “conflict is often an outcome of desperation, climate and insecurity.”
Mr. Starmer will meet Mr. Trump three days after President Emmanuel Macron of France, who also sought to project unity between Europe and the United States but gently resisted him on several points. Mr. Macron corrected an assertion from Mr. Trump that Europe would be paid back for its aid to Ukraine.
Mr. Starmer is expected to play host to a meeting of European leaders in London on Sunday to discuss joint plans for the continent’s security, following his meeting with the president in Washington. That would build on meetings hosted by Mr. Macron in Paris last week after Mr. Trump announced that he would begin direct talks with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on a cease-fire in Ukraine.
