When Defense Secretary Ash Carter confers with his fellow NATO defense ministers this week in Brussels, he will likely sense some trepidation among the allies about Donald Trump.
After all, Trump has pronounced the 67-year-old alliance “obsolete” in its current form, and says the U.S. should be willing to walk away from NATO if the other 27 nations don’t chip in more of the costs and do more of the heavy-lifting.
It’s a position that Trump has not backed away from, and a stance that drew fire from Democrat Hillary Clinton in a foreign policy speech in which she portrayed Trump as “temperamentally unfit” for the White House.
“This is someone who has threatened to abandon our allies in NATO – the countries that work with us to root out terrorists abroad before they strike us at home,” Clinton said in her June 2 address in San Diego.
But Trump is not an outlier in his assertion that the U.S. is getting ripped off, spending disproportionately on the defense of freeloaders.
In fact, non-U.S. NATO nations were pointedly warned five years ago that they risked the “very real possibility of collective military irrelevance” if they didn’t start paying their fair share.
“I am the latest in a string of U.S. defense secretaries who have urged allies privately and publicly, often with exasperation, to meet agreed-upon NATO benchmarks for defense spending,” lectured former Pentagon chief Robert Gates at a 2011 NATO defense ministerial.
Gates, an acknowledged national security heavyweight, even predicted the rise of someone with Trump’s disdain of the parsimonious Europeans.
“Future U.S. political leaders — those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me — may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost,” he said in his 2011 address.
“The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress, and in the American body politic writ large, to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense,” he said.
Back then, Gates was complaining that the U.S. share of NATO defense spending had risen from 50 percent during the Cold War to more than 75 percent, and that only five of the 28 NATO nations — U.S., U.K., France, Greece, and Albania — exceeded the agreed-upon guideline of spending 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense.
Fast-forward to today, and the numbers aren’t any better.
Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow with the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, has crunched the numbers, and says the U.S. now accounts for 73 percent of all NATO defense spending.
But part of that, Blakely says, has to do with America’s superpower status and its unmatched military might. “The United States also has a very broad set of core global national interests that many of the European NATO countries don’t necessarily share.”
At a NATO summit in Wales in 2014, all 28 members of the alliance committed to a goal of spending at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense, as well as 20 percent of that on major equipment and weapons.
So far only three countries have met that goal: the U.S., the U.K. and Poland. Two more, Greece and Estonia, spend 2 percent on defense, but not 20 percent on major systems.
So when NATO acts, as it did in Libya in 2011, it falls to the U.S. to do much of the grunt work. No other NATO nation has the necessary number of aircraft carriers, stealth bombers, GPS-guided cruise missiles, armed drones or spy satellites.
“There is an overreliance on the United States for those key enabling technologies, like air-to-air refueling, like [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance), like airborne [electronic warfare],” Blakeley said.
All NATO countries have pledged to meet the 2/20 percent standard within a decade, so is Trump misguided to issues threats?
He wouldn’t be the first president to use that tactic. President Obama reportedly warned British Prime Minister David Cameron that Great Britain’s “special relationship” with the U.S. was in jeopardy if the U.K. didn’t cough up its fair share, and meet the 2 percent threshold. Britain complied.
In a lengthy April article in the Atlantic, Obama explained to Jeffrey Goldberg, “Free riders aggravate me.”
Sounds like something Trump would say.
And he did, in March, at a town hall event broadcast on CNN, “You have countries in NATO that are getting a free ride and it’s unfair, it’s very unfair.”
As for his threat made during an MSNBC interview around the same time to withdraw from NATO: that’s a classic negotiating tactic straight out of Trump’s 1987 book The Art of the Deal.
“If we have to walk, we walk,” he said.
