The accession deal struck on Tuesday to see Finland and Sweden join NATO is good news. Finland, in particular, has a well-armed, resourced, and trained military. More importantly, this makes clear to Vladimir Putin that his aggression will mean further isolation and further military alignment against Russia.
The accession reflects something else: NATO is the world’s most enduring and important multinational alliance. It directly serves American interests, as well as those of our allies.
But NATO has a big and increasingly urgent problem.
Even as Russia wages a major war in Ukraine, the largest European ground war since 1945, too many NATO member states continue to treat the alliance like a one-way piggy bank. A trough, that is to say, from which they can extract truly priceless defense commitments and capabilities while expending very little of their own resources. All NATO members agreed to rectify this mismatch of resource commitments with a collective 2014 pledge to reach a minimum 2%-of-GDP defense spending target.
Eight years later, the results are in. Failure is the word of the day. The 2022 NATO summit on Tuesday encapsulates the problem. After all, the summit is being held in Spain.
Spain is a general of the piggy bank brigade. Just consider the latest NATO defense spending figures released on Monday. Those figures show that out of the 30 NATO member states, only Luxembourg spends less than Spain as a percentage of GDP on defense. NATO estimates that Spain will spend just 1.01% of GDP on defense in 2022. Think about that statistic. Eight years after the 2014 pledge, Spain is barely meeting half the minimum spending target. Indeed, Spain’s penchant for allowing Russian warships to dock at its ports on their way to slaughtering Syrian civilians is equally ignominious.
Still, it would be unfair to single Spain out. Just ahead of Spain on the piggy bank charts is Belgium at 1.18%-of-GDP defense spending. Belgium is the nation that has the utterly undeserved honor of hosting NATO’s headquarters. Or take Justin Trudeau’s Canada, which is at a similarly pathetic 1.27% of GDP. NATO’s central challenge is that these members aren’t the exceptions to the rule, simply the worst examples of it.
Take the European Union powerhouses of France and Germany. It might be tempting to look at France’s 1.9%-of-GDP 2022 estimate and say, ‘Well, they’re getting close to the target.’ The problem is that this is 2022. France has had eight years to get to 2%. But the record of Europe’s largest economy, Germany, is truly laughable — or tragic, depending on how you look at it. At 1.44% of GDP, Germany is languishing even behind Italy, which is at 1.54% of GDP. To his credit, Chancellor Olaf Scholz has ordered a crash spending plan to see Germany massively ramp up defense spending in light of the war in Ukraine. But we’ll have to wait to see whether these promised investments pan out. Regardless, Germany’s defense posture proves Angela Merkel’s position as the most overrated Western leader in modern history.
Some claim that the 2% target is overemphasized in its importance. They are wrong. As the 2014 pledge failure proves, NATO’s credibility is measured not by summits but by the weight those exchanges of pleasantries carry alongside harder capabilities. In the end, it is airlift, intelligence assets, deep strike, and maneuverable combat assets that hold adversaries in check. The war in Ukraine proves that NATO needs more of the things that NATO overwhelmingly relies upon the United States to provide. To reemphasize: Words will not stop the Russian invasion of the Baltics, only the credible annihilation of the invaders will. More importantly, Europe has the wealth and the interests to afford at least the 2% target.
The challenge of fixing things is urgent.
China means that even if the U.S. wanted to, it cannot keep subsidizing Europe’s defense. The existential threat that Communist China poses to the democratic international order and to critical U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific must take priority in military investments and deployment structures moving forward. Facing an advanced and scaled-up Chinese military determined to vanquish Taiwan and seize $5 trillion trade routes through the South China Sea, the U.S. military cannot keep so many intelligence, air, and naval assets in Europe (a consideration made worse by pork fetish idiocy in Congress). Some Europeans recognize this.
The new head of the British Army, for example, used a landmark speech on Tuesday to observe that “given the commitments of the U.S. in Asia during the 2020s and 2030s, I believe that the burden for conventional deterrence in Europe will fall increasingly to European members of NATO … This is right in my view: taking up the burden in Europe means we can free more U.S. resources to ensure that our values and interests are protected in the Indo-Pacific.”
The problem is that not enough Europeans get the point. And too many of those who do get it don’t get it with the requisite degree of urgency. The choice thus follows: Europe and Canada can finally, and immediately, start taking the principle of alliance burden-sharing seriously. Or the world’s most important alliance will crumble at the intersection of China’s pursuit of hegemony, escalating Russian threats, and unyielding European impotence.
