
BRUSSELS – The pledge NATO member countries made to spend 2 percent of their gross domestic products on defense is largely symbolic and has served more to arrest the alliance-wide drop in military funding since the Cold War, according to a senior Pentagon official.“The Wales pledge, in fact, has helped us stop the drop in defense spending,” the official said. “As small as that sounds, it is actually huge…It’s starting to tick up. It’s not every nation but most of…