Secretary of Defense James Mattis spent several days in meetings with his fellow defense ministers at NATO’s expensive new headquarters in Brussels this week. Mattis’ trip to Western Europe, however, wasn’t a care-free rendezvous. The retired four-star field and combatant commander carried a message from President Trump that all of the alliance’s members have gotten used to hearing: Europeans must be as concerned about Russia as Washington, and each and every single one of them should pay their fair share to contribute to the common defense of Europe.
It should be noted that extracting more defense dollars from European governments is not a Trump-specific initiative. Presidents as far back as George W. Bush have attempted to hammer home the point that burden-sharing is not just a theoretical concept; it’s indispensable to NATO as an organization and its credibility. Successive NATO Secretaries General have largely paid lip service to the burden sharing argument, mainly because U.S. leaders have cold, hard math on their side.
After 25 years of low defense budgets—supplemented by defense welfare at the expense of U.S. taxpayers—NATO member states are just beginning to dig themselves out of their spending hole. NATO only ended a quarter-century of defense cuts in 2015, just after Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. To the alliance’s credit, last year saw the highest year-on-year increase in military spending, adding to a $46-billion increase over the last three fiscal years.
The disparity between what the United States contributed and what everybody else throws in, however, is shamefully large, especially when one considers that the European economy is on par with the United States. It is perfectly rational and indeed expected that each of NATO’s 29 member states spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense, the benchmark established by NATO itself.
But herein lies the problem: There are no internal measures within NATO that can be levied to introduce accountability.
Pledges without enforcement attached are simply pledges with no teeth, precisely the system we have today. Outside of drastically reducing U.S. military expenditures in Europe, shuttering military bases in Germany and Italy, or redeploying thousands of American troops off the continent, all the United States can do about the spending gap is complain vociferously and publicly shame nations not pulling their weight.
The current system is like a country club that somehow forgot to give itself the power to suspend or expel members who fail to pay their dues. If this is a ridiculous business model for a country club, it’s an unthinkable way to manage the world’s largest and oldest military alliance.
What would Russia think if NATO started eschewing members for simply neglecting to pay their bills? For one, they may begin to see NATO as a resolute alliance in pursuit of concrete interests, rather than an institution in search of a mission. Russia might take the credibility of NATO’s collective deterrent more seriously if the organization itself enforced its own rules on its own members.
So, before President Trump flies to Brussels this summer for his second NATO conference, he should order his national security advisors to begin a conversation in various NATO forums on a new clause within the Washington Treaty or an arrangement among the alliance’s heads-of-state. Its purpose would be to add consequences on those countries not committed to methodical annual defense budget increases to meet the agreed-upon defense spending target. This would be one of the most difficult family conversations within NATO since the Soviet Union dissolved. Yet it’s a discussion that should have taken place years earlier, one that is urgently needed if the alliance is to be taken seriously in today’s world.
Some in the mainstream foreign policy consensus on both sides of the Atlantic would predictably squeal in displeasure and call this proposal troubling in terms of alliance solidarity. But the far bigger trouble, and indeed a far bigger betrayal to NATO’s cohesion, would be continuing to take advantage of one ally—the United States—and depend on it almost completely for Europe’s defense indefinitely. Not only would this be grossly unfair to the American taxpayer, but also a dangerous signal to NATO’s adversaries that without the United States, the alliance is a paper tiger unable to execute its core objective: collective defense of the transatlantic community.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a fellow at Defense Priorities. His opinions are his own.
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