In Brussels, President Trump pushed NATO members to meet a commitment to spend 2 percent of their country’s GDP by 2024. Then he upped the stakes and said that he wanted this spending goal to be met immediately and that that goal should be 4 percent of GDP, not 2 percent. While Trump might enjoy throwing around these numbers and pushing around world leaders, spending 4 percent of GDP on defense won’t help NATO or the U.S. meet modern threats to the world order that America established and greatly benefits from.
When NATO was founded, the Soviet Union posed a military threat to Europe and World War II had devastated the continent. The strategic alliance of NATO was meant to counter both of these threats – to the benefit on the United States. A stable and free Europe and North America meant that the U.S. had access to a vast network of trading partners, that a large part of the world was free from the threat of conventional warfare and its enormous cost in both lives and dollars and that the United States had firm allies that would come to our defense if attacked. Indeed, the one and only time that the NATO commitment to come to the aid of a member nation under attack was invoked was after the September 11 attacks.
Over time, NATO has proved flexible to meet and address new threats from the outbreak of the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crises, to the fall of the Soviet Union and more recent Russian aggression in Crimea and Ukraine.
It was against this backdrop and history of meeting new challenges in new ways, that former President Barack Obama asked NATO members in 2014 to meet a commitment to spend at least 2 percent of GDP by 2024 on defense. Russia had forcibly annexed Crimea and was arming separatists in Ukraine and there was the felling, especially among Baltic states Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, that NATO’s assured defense was the main bulwark against Russian aggression.
Now, four years later, although Russian activity in both Crimea and Ukraine has yet to be resolved, Europe is facing different threats that are not so easily solved with more spending of defense. Refugees fleeing war have pushed European nations in increasingly nationalistic and authoritarian directions undermining the stable and peaceful, post-World War II order that NATO has helped to establish and maintain.
These threats to liberal democracy and rule of law, often feed by Russian interference with elections and funding of fringe groups meant to destabilize democracies, should be the new focus of NATO. Although cybersecurity and other defense measures are important to safeguarding Europe, these are band-aids for the larger problems fueling hyper-nationalism.
Spending should be focused on the more difficult, and not militarily focused, efforts of diplomacy, humanitarian aid and integration of refugees. In the long run, these endeavors can help prevent a renewed refugee crisis by stabilizing fragile states, mitigate the threat of xenophobic nationalism and ensure that Europe and the U.S. remain free to focus on economic development that has allowed for the rapid and worldwide progress and prosperity since the conclusion of the World War II.
With U.S. allies in NATO, Trump should focus on addressing actual threats, not tweeting spending targets.
