Our NATO allies are “eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets.”
You might think this is a line from one of former President Donald Trump’s stump speeches decrying the majority of NATO members’ continual failure to meet their defense spending commitment of 2% GDP. But this was a direct warning from then-Obama Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in 2011.
For nearly half a century, United States leaders have pleaded with our allies to step up their share of the burden. But until Trump began the public drumbeat for defense cost-sharing, European politicians were quite comfortable with American taxpayers subsidizing their defense so they could pay for their social welfare programs. As a result, the alliance is falling short of addressing the threats of today’s great power competition.
When Trump visited Brussels in 2017 to urge NATO members to “contribute their fair share and meet their financial obligations,” Trump was accused of scolding and chastising our allies.
Despite the outrage from the media and foreign policy elite, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was quick to praise Trump’s remarks, arguing it was the same message he’d given dating back to the 1970s while serving in the Nixon and Ford administrations.
Though there has been much groveling from previous administrations about burden sharing, Trump was simply louder and successful at finally getting our allies to pay up. Unlike his predecessors, Trump had a unique capability to deter our enemies and influence our friends — that is why, for example, Iran’s oil exports dropped so precipitously under his sanctions despite the opposition of every other major world power. That is also why Europe began to increase its defense spending. Germany and others believed Trump meant what he said and weren’t sure what he would do if they opposed him.
President Joe Biden’s U.S. ambassador to NATO, Julianne Smith, recently took to X in a not-so-subtle attempt to push back on Trump’s recent comments on alliance burden-sharing in an attempt to show members were paying up. But her post instead highlighted two other things.
First, according to her figures, growth in defense spending by allied NATO countries nearly doubled at the start of the Trump administration, from an increase of 3.0% per year in 2016 to 5.9% in 2017, and then decreased from 4.6% in 2020 to 2.8 % in 2021 after Biden took office. It’s no wonder European leaders were excited about Joe Biden’s election.
