While many NATO member states have duly answered Ukraine’s call to supply it with heavy weaponry, for other countries President Zelensky’s plight has offered a stark realisation what decades of defence cuts have come to. For no country is this true more than for Belgium, which in March 2022 had to come to the painful conclusion that it had no heavy weaponry to send from its own stocks. This staggering feat is the result of years of chronic underfunding that had eroded the Belgian Army to the point it could not even pay to operate man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS) any longer, leaving an entire army without any form of ground-based air defences. Although Belgium has since announced additional investments into its military, it will take years for these investments to actually have effect.

Belgium’s free-riding approach to the security of other NATO member states and of itself is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that in 2014 Belgian Prime Minister Di Rupo declared his country’s intention to commit 2% of its GDP to defence spending by 2024, only for Prime Minister De Croo to do the same in 2022, but with the date to achieve this pushed back by eleven years to 2035. [1] Even after rising slightly in recent years, Belgium’s budget remains one of the lowest in NATO, just barely cresting 1% of GDP for the first time in years in 2020 and 2021. [2] An early conclusion to the Russo-Ukrainian War, though unfortunately unlikely to occur at this point in time, would likely serve as the perfect excuse for a future Belgian government to keep the country’s defence budget well below 2% of its GDP.