HELSINKI | The Trump administration’s loudest complaints about NATO — that Europe isn’t pulling its weight in defense spending and security — are meeting a different reality here in Finland, one of the alliance’s newest Nordic member nations.
Finland’s top foreign and defense officials say their country’s response to the critical U.S. rhetoric and the calls for increased defense spending isn’t about pledges or promises. It’s a balance sheet that shows how high the nation’s security priorities were before ever joining NATO.
“We have exactly the same position as President Trump in the sense that we think that NATO is not at its full potential yet,” Minister for Foreign Affairs Elina Valtonen said recently. “The European countries have not invested enough from their pocket in the defense of deterrence.”
“Finland certainly has,” she said on Tuesday in a media roundtable discussion with journalists, including a reporter from The Washington Times’ Threat Status platform.
Her comments came as Mr. Trump’s recent announcement to pull 5,000 or more soldiers from Germany pushes countries along NATO’s eastern flank to rebuff the perception that they are a security drain on the coalition.
“Finland has spent a significant portion of GDP even before it became a member state,” Ms. Valtonen said.
Without question, Helsinki was watching closely over the past decade, as the dynamic of U.S. military aid and security guarantees to Europe through NATO became a core issue of American foreign policy debates.
Mr. Trump has made it a centerpiece of his national security philosophy and has insisted that European nations spend much more on their own defense rather than rely on the U.S. military as a backstop in the event of conflict.
Mr. Trump’s approach — while criticized by some for being too rhetorically harsh toward NATO — has paid dividends. Each NATO nation has promised to spend at least 5% of its GDP on defense by 2035. Mr. Trump has also pressed NATO countries to stop importing Russian oil as a way to put economic pressure on Moscow.
Finland’s unique position
Finland joined NATO in April 2023, a year after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, an assault that struck a nerve among many Finns given the country’s difficult history with Moscow.
The former Soviet Union, under Russian leadership, had annexed substantial territory from Finland — most notably Karelia — during and after World War II.
Despite that history, Helsinki had remained militarily non-aligned for decades, with less than a quarter of the Finnish population supporting any bid for NATO membership.
But following the Russian attack on Ukraine, public support among Finns for joining NATO rose to more than 50%, particularly during the weeks after the invasion, when Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that Finland could not decide its own security posture.
With the Nordic country already heavily invested in its own defense and in Arctic security, especially against Russia, the scales were suddenly tipped toward NATO ascension for Finns. And, out of the gate in 2025, Finland was ranked ninth among the alliance’s 32 member nations in terms of percentage of GDP spent on defense, according to World Population Review.
While Helsinki came in at roughly 2.77% of GDP, not far below the United States, which spent 3.2% of GDP on defense in 2025, Ms. Valtonen emphasized that the number is rising quickly for Helsinki.
In her roundtable with reporters, the Finnish minister for foreign affairs endorsed the U.S.-driven spending target of 5% of GDP, describing it as the correct diplomatic move to keep Washington engaged against what she called the “existential threat” posed by Russia.
“The U.S. is not leaving NATO,” Ms. Valtonen said.
Her comments were echoed by the Finnish Minister of Defense Antti Hakkanen, who took an even stronger tack. The two spoke with a delegation of international journalists participating in a regional press tour sponsored by NATO’s eastern flank countries as the Trump administration continues to weigh the U.S. role in the alliance.
“Russia is really preparing for a larger confrontation with the West now,” Mr. Hakkanen said. “Not just in Ukraine, but also the next phase.”
The two Finnish officials pointed to the niche capabilities of NATO’s Nordic partners, which include Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, the last of which is the alliance’s newest member nation, having joined in 2024, roughly a year after Finland.
Mr. Hakkanen emphasized the need for growing Nordic security cooperation with the United States. He noted reports that Russia has been moving its ballistic missile and nuclear arsenal further north, asserting that the Nordic countries see themselves as the de facto Arctic security guarantors.
“What we are outlining in defense in NATO and cooperation with the U.S. is a win-win situation,” the Finnish defense minister said. “We want to be a security provider, not a consumer, even though we have half of the NATO-Russian border.”
Mr. Hakkanen added that he sees Russian nuclear weapons just across his border as less of a threat to Finland than a threat that could “jeopardize U.S. homeland security” because of the “long-strike capabilities” of the weapons.
Ms. Valtonen made a similar point. “We as the Nordics, we of course know exactly what’s going on, on the Russian side in the Arctic, and for instance, Russia’s main nuclear arsenal is placed in the Arctic,” she said. “Those weapons are not headed against Helsinki or Stockholm, but the goals are rather Washington, D.C., or New York.”
Focus on the Arctic
NATO’s Nordic member nations have been active in the Arctic region at the top of the world for generations, and Nordic government officials often characterize their collective militaries as an Arctic force.
With that as a backdrop, Finland and Norway have been pushing increasingly to reframe Arctic security policy as U.S. interest in NATO has waned. Officials say a particular priority centers on countering Russia’s growing push to develop more direct naval routes into the Atlantic Ocean via the Arctic.
Mr. Hakkanen said Finland’s niche capabilities are chronically undersold and that Helsinki views Arctic security as a shared U.S.-Finland equities issue, not a peripheral concern.
He told journalists that he has been mildly frustrated that U.S. public rhetoric does not reflect the operational understanding that already exists between American and Finnish forces at the intelligence and military-to-military level.
“We have a mutual understanding about Russian threats through our intelligence cooperation with the U.S.” Mr. Hakkanen said, highlighting existing bilateral and regional intelligence agreements his country has in place with Washington.
“We know exactly what Russia is doing, deeper inside the country or at the neighboring sites,” the Finnish defense minister said.
In response to questions from The Times, Mr. Hakkanen went on to assert that a key driver of Moscow’s goals in the Arctic is to sow division among NATO member nations.
“Russia’s biggest interests in the Arctic are to have these clear positions separating NATO countries if there is some kind of a conflict,” he said.
Moscow’s tactics come as Mr. Trump has suggested the U.S. could back away from NATO at any time. The president said in an interview in early April that he is “absolutely” considering trying to withdraw the U.S. from NATO, saying the alliance hasn’t “been friends when we need them.”
The notion that the U.S. might not come to the aid of NATO countries that haven’t contributed enough to their own defense has been pushing alliance members along Russia’s border to strengthen their own direct bilateral ties with the United States, as well as more local regional security partnerships.
Mr. Hakkanen stressed that “it’s beneficial for the U.S. and Europe, and the U.S. and Finland, especially, to have a lot of cooperation.”
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