President Trump’s call on Wednesday for NATO member states to increase their defense spending targets from 2 percent to 4 percent of GDP was positive for two reasons.
First, because it offered a striking rebuke to Germany’s use of the 2 percent target as an excuse for its lethargic defense resourcing growth. Recall that it was just last week that the German Chancellor Angela Merkel tried to deflect U.S. criticism of German defense spending by suggesting that she would spend 1.5 percent of GDP on defense by 2024. That pathetic excuse for action and the broader arrogance it reflects deserved repudiation. And in Trump’s 4 percent argument, the U.S. president has injected repudiation under a realist argument based on the urgency of doing more, now.
Such urgent realism speaks to the second point here: need.
Specifically, the need for NATO to escape its present predicament in being incapable of adequately deterring and confidently defeating any external aggressor.
Russia, by Vladimir Putin’s conduct and stated territorial interests, is the key threat here. With Russia targeting transatlantic communication cables, practicing a war-fighting doctrine built on rapid area seizure and access denial, attempting to kill Western intelligence agents and innocent civilians, reinforcing nuclear strike options, and disrupting NATO interests the world over, NATO needs the capability to confront it.
Angela Merkel and Donald Tusk and Charles Michel might claim that Trump is damaging the fabric of the world’s most important alliance, but they are doing far more damage to that alliance by starving its means of deterrence. Russian combined armed formations, after all, cannot be deterred by words. They can only be stopped by Putin’s understood vulnerability to his own destruction.
Were NATO members to spend anywhere close to 4 percent of GDP on defense, they would give NATO the new rapid reaction brigades, F-35 strike fighter squadrons, submarine interdiction forces, electronic and cyber warfare capabilities, and intelligence acquisition and targeting means to destroy threatening forces. There is thus no question in my mind that Trump is right to do what his predecessor did not, and push hard for a more kill-capable NATO alliance.
The simple truth is that unless Trump pushes the Europeans hard, they will simply keep doing what they are doing. Which is to say, treating NATO as a joke and succumbing to Russia’s energy blackmail strategy.
