Can NATO Pay Up?
Elisabeth Braw
November 10, 2016
If adherence to the 2 percent benchmark is not a good measurement of commitment, what is?
In recent years NATO has been showing renewed signs of vitality. But with challenges ranging from Russia to refugees, it’s also struggling to strengthen its cohesion. And despite promises of more spending on defense, most of NATO’s members lag on their commitments to defense spending. With Donald Trump in the White House, the issue of European allies’ defense spending will almost certainly acquire new urgency.
A security alliance needs credible security resources: NATO asks its members to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense. But this year, only
five countries—the United States at 3.61 percent, Greece, the United Kingdom, Estonia and Poland—are meeting NATO’s 2 percent benchmark.
Despite recent defense spending increases in several countries, including Latvia and Lithuania most, of their allies don’t even come close to the 2 percent mark. Canada, for example, is spending 0.99 percent of its GDP on defense. Germany is spending 1.19 percent, Italy 1.11 percent and Spain 0.91 percent. The United States accounts for 70 percent of NATO’s defense spending.
“There has been a shift in attitudes among European allies over the past several years,” said Ian Brzezinski, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Europe and NATO policy under George W. Bush. “We shouldn’t overstate it, but we also shouldn’t understate it. The question is whether it will continue. There’s emergent recognition in Europe that it has to do more and spend more to sustain the transatlantic bargain.”
In 1985, during the height of the Cold War,
West Germany spent 3.3 percent, Italy 2.7 percent and Canada 2.2 percent, while Greece spent a whopping 7.1 percent of its GDP on the military. Spain was not yet a member. (As is the case today, Greece’s defense spending had more to do with Turkey than a commitment to NATO benchmarks.) In the United States, defense spending made up 6.9 percent of GDP. Defense spending made up an average of 5.6 percent of NATO members’ GDP, according to official NATO statistics.
Just like a subway train that drives even if some of its passengers have dodged the fare, NATO is functioning. But some allies’ perceived lack of willingness to share the joint burden is irritating some allies, especially the Americans.
Last month at the Riga Conference, a major security conference, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense Michael Carpenter
again reiterated U.S. calls for more allies to increase spending. And this summer, Trump
said that under his leadership the United States would defend the Baltic states only if he deemed that the countries had “fulfilled their obligations to us.”
Marko Mihkelson, chairman of the Estonian parliament’s defense committee, told me that “the U.S. accounting for 70 percent of NATO defense spending is firmly out of balance. What sort of alliance is it where all the allies depend on just one country?” In Estonia’s parliamentary defense committee, Mihkelson said, members of all the parties show a “rock-solid” commitment to 2 percent defense spending. “We take our commitment to the alliance extremely seriously,” he explained. “It’s our key defense. We can’t have all military capabilities, and even if we did, we would not be able to deter threats alone.”
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/can-nato-pay-18362