Eighteen members of NATO will spend at least 2% of GDP on defense, the security bloc’s top official revealed amid renewed anxiety about the U.S. commitment to the trans-Atlantic alliance.

“That is another record number, and a sixfold increase from 2014, when only three Allies met the target,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced Wednesday. “In 2024, NATO Allies in Europe will invest a combined total of $380 billion in defense. For the first time, this amounts to 2% of their combined GDP.”

Stoltenberg unveiled those figures on the cusp of a meeting of NATO defense chiefs. The NATO leaders will mark the 75th anniversary of the alliance in Washington, D.C., in July. That comes just days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where former President Donald Trump’s expected coronation as the GOP nominee is set to underscore the doubts in diplomatic circles that the United States would come to the defense of European allies in a crisis.

“And the whole idea of NATO is that an attack on one Ally will trigger the response from the whole Alliance,” Stoltenberg said. “So any suggestion that we are not standing up for each other, that we are not going to protect each other, that does undermine the security of all of us, increasing the risks. And therefore, it is so important that we both, in action, but also in words, communicate clearly that we stand by NATO’s commitment to protect and defend all Allies.”

Stoltenberg underscored that logic in the context of Trump’s recent remark that he would “encourage” an adversary to “do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that he deems “delinquent” on defense spending. That comment spurred one of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s top allies to suggest that the European Union no longer can rest secure under the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

“The nuclear deterrent for Europe lies with NATO. As NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg rightly noted, it remains in the Americans’ interest to provide this significantly,” Germany’s Katarina Barley, a leading member of Scholz’s political party in the European Parliament, told a German paper. “Given Donald Trump’s recent statements, this can no longer be relied upon. This could also become an issue on the way to a European army.”

Another top German politician dismissed such talk.

“This is ultimately an evolved, sophisticated system in which the whole of Europe must be protected,” Germany’s defense committee chairwoman, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, said Wednesday, according to a translation by Politico’s European affiliate. “I don’t think most people know what that means — apart from the costs.”

European powers have struggled even to muster the rudiments of conventional military power, as the war in Ukraine has exposed their difficulty in producing artillery ammunition at rates needed to match Russia’s firepower.

“We must move from manufacturing to mass production of armaments,” Scholz said Tuesday at a ceremony to break ground on Rheinmetall’s new arms factory. “Tanks, howitzers, helicopters, and air defense systems are not lined up on the shelves. If nothing is ordered for years, then nothing is produced.”

That delayed timeline means that even such a major move to expand production won’t equip Europe to fend off an “aggressor who wants to fight against NATO,” as a German defense industry mogul put it.

“We are fine in three, four years — but to be really prepared, we need 10 years,” Rheinmetall’s chief executive Armin Papperger told the BBC. “We have to produce 1.5 million rounds [of ammunition] in Europe. … As long as we have war, we have to help Ukraine, but later, we [will] need five years at a minimum and 10 years to really fill [ammunition stocks] up.”

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Stoltenberg, for his part, emphasized the presence of “U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe, [with] other NATO Allies providing the planes, the infrastructure, the support, to be able to ensure that this nuclear deterrent is functional, operational, safe and secure and reliable.” In combination with conventional military power, he argued, that nuclear deterrent should remain effective. 

“Part of this is also, of course, that we have two other Allies with nuclear weapons, the United Kingdom and France,” he said. “And I think the issue is that this is the way we organize our nuclear deterrent in NATO, and we should do nothing to undermine the credibility of all that, either.”