You might disagree with Trump on many things but isnt he right in saying that each NATO country should pay its way, ie 2% of gross domestic product? At present only 5 countries meet that commitment, the US, UK, Poland, Estonia and Greece. This is out of 28 members! My God, if Greece can pay their fair share, why not countries like Canada, France, Germany, Italy?
Don’t the recalcitrant countries need a figurative kick up the ass?
NATO fundingis both direct (funded by a GNI formula) for alliance wide costing and then indirect,which ties back to the 2% you’re discussing.
So I went and looked at Member states of NATO - Wikipedia and summed up the difference between 2% and the listed % allocated. I get roughly $60 billion dollars - that’s about 11% of the US military budget.
So…which 10% of the US military would NOT exist if that $60 billion suddenly appeared? I’d hazard a guess the answer is that the US DOD budget would continue to sit around $600 billion dollars regardless of all NATO members hitting the 2% level.
Let me add, I am leaving the fairness question aside. There’s no reason the US has to spend 3.3% on their military to meet NATO requirements. It could equally drop it’s military allocation to 2.5% and save 180 billion a year. Whether it should is a different question.
The 2 percent figure is a pulled-of-of-thin-air figure anyway. It’s not an absolutely fantastic measure - look at the list posted by Grey, for instance. Norway is under the 2% figure but spends more per capita than anyone save the USA.
If Russia invaded Europe, Europeans would be doing most of the dying and bleeding. That’s worth something, too.
Should NATO countries be spending more on defense? Well, maybe. Make a case for it. Explain what NATO’s military capabilities are, how they differ from what they should be, and why spending 2% of their budgets on defense would fix that. I’d also like to see an explanation as to why this would reduce the U.S. defense budget, a theory I sincerely doubt.
NATO members do not “pay their way.” They have a general commitment to protect the other members, and then engage in specific arrangements around unifying their defense efforts. It’s not a protection arrangement run by the U.S. government.
Incidentally, you missed France as a country that spends over 2 percent on defense. France and the UK also both have nuclear deterrents.
I agree with the OP- it seems that most of NATO is more or less leeching off US defense spending. It does make pragmatic sense- why spend more than you have to, when you’re in a long-standing friendly alliance with the biggest military on the planet by far? I mean, nobody’s going to attack Italy if they know that an attack on Italy means that the US comes in armed for bear.
The question is more of a political one- should this be a state of affairs we are complacent about? It seems kind of presumptuous for the Europeans to take advantage like they are.
How are they taking advantage? I’d ask you read some of the responses to the OP.
The U.S. spends what it does on defense to protect its own interests. We are long, long past the days when American defense spending was heavily concentrated on defending Western Europe.
Well then I’ll ask again. What 60 billion dollar slice of the US DOD budget would be freed up?
Yeah, the current US military spending is not due to the burdens of being a NATO member, and Europe would not suddenly be overrun by Russia if the US chose to decrease its military budget.
And as president elect of the only country getting into wars and then asking for NATO assistance in the last few decades “what have they ever done for us?” is a question Trump might be surprised at the answer to.
Not so. You’ll see from the chart on this site under the heading Falling Short that France has not met the required commitment for 2014 or 2015
The 2% is a desired goal, not a requirement.
Perhaps the various NATO members can stop supporting US interests in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc., and reassign their military spending on these missions to NATO instead.
It’s not like anything bad ever happened when Europe militarized.
One of the things that Trump doesn’t seem to have realized before is that NATO stands for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It, along with many of our other long-standing military alliances such as with South Korea and Japan, are based on treaties that are ratified by the Senate and are legally binding instruments. His “it’s just ink on a page” approach doesn’t just undermine an alliance, it calls into question every U.S. treaty where the U.S. obligates itself to do something. As others have noted, there is nothing in the treaty about members spending a certain percentage of their GDP for their defense budget.
Undermining U.S. legal, political, and military commitments strengthens the enemies of the U.S. While European countries should spend more on their own defense, particularly if they want to still be able to have inter-operability with U.S. equipment and forces, ultimatums generally don’t work well. Especially when it comes across as extortion. NATO isn’t a protection racket and the U.S. isn’t the Saviors.
I don’t think it would free anything up necessarily, but how would we know? In large part, the interests of NATO *are *the interests of the US.
With that said, is there necessarily a reason to keep 3 fighter wings, 2 brigades, and a host of support units in Europe anymore? I can see having a fleet in the Mediterranean, but I’m not so sure we need quite that combat unit footprint anymore.
By way of comparison, the 2 combat brigades (2nd Cav and 173rd Abn) compose a force roughly 1/3 the size of the combat brigade total of the Bundeswehr, and about the size of the entire Danish or Hungarian armies. None of Germany, Hungary or Denmark spend anywhere near the 2% goal either.
And with the exception of the Royal Navy and Marine Nationale, the NATO naval strength is nearly entirely composed of the US Navy.
I guess my point is that if all nations made an effort to meet to that 2% target, then it would either free US forces for use elsewhere, or give us an opportunity to draw down our force levels some without any perceived lack of coverage.
The U.S. forces stationed in Europe have a variety of functions, maybe the most important of which is to demonstrate U.S. resolve to European security. If we just have a token force there, similar to what the U.S. had in South Korea prior to the Korean War, it reduces U.S. credibility to defend Europe, particularly since the NATO Supreme Commander is traditionally an American.
But in addition to joint training and workings towards inter-operability, U.S. forces there also provide a surge function if they had to be deployed anywhere just outside of Europe, as some forces were deployed during the Iraq War and more recently with CJTF-OIR in the fight against Da’esh.
I’m not sure where you’re getting this information, since the U.S. only has a handful of destroyers based in Spain and a command and control ship based in Italy as its forward stationed ships in Europe. The UK/France aside, Spain, Italy, Germany, and even Portugal have well more than the handful of ships the U.S. has in Europe.
It’s a big debate in European countries. It’s not just Trump - NATO’s Secretary Generals have been saying it. Currently that’s Jens Stoltenberg, former Norwegian PM. (I’m Norwegian, FTR.) I haven’t been paying that much attention to other countries’ specific debates, but I’ll lay out ours.
Norway defends its’ military expenditure of about 1,5% in several ways. As someone upthread pointed out, per capita we’re the 6th biggest military spender in the world. (Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Israel, USA, Kuwait, Norway.)
We also feed a lot of money back into the US and German systems - NATOs de facto backbone - by buying a lot of modern equipment off US and German retailers. Our artillery is German M109s (M109A3GNM), our tanks are Leopard 2s, our APCs are M113s, a lot of our helos are NH90s or Bell 412s. Not to mention that virtually all of our infantry weapon systems are American.
We’ve ordered 52 F35s, which we estimate to cost $769 million over their lifetime. Each. That program’s a known pork-barrel project for an inferior product, feeding money to the US “to keep us in with the Americans”, which is why both left-wing and right-wing governments have resisted the huge pressure to call off the planned purchases.
And still there’s a lot of us who say we should up it to 2% of GDP. If we won’t, who will? The only ones who’ve made a concerted effort the last three years are Lithuania and Latvia. (Both up from <1% to >1,5% in 3 years.)
The people in Norway who disagree usually bring up some admittedly good arguments.
[ul]
[li]What’s Russia going to do when 21 countries increase their military spending by 25 to 120%? In an alliance that traditionally exists to “Keep the Germans down, the Americans in and the Russians out”?[/li][li] Large armies will be used, if only to justify their existence. Which of the many military misadventures of the last 20 years can be used as examples to think that that’s in any way a good idea?[/li][li]We share a land border with Russia and literally haven’t had a war with Russia in milennia.[/li][li]Any actual NATO war with Russia will go nuclear in about 5 minutes. The US, UK and France have nuclear weapons, rendering the entire thing pointless. [/li][/ul]
I don’t buy into those arguments, but they are pervasive. I’m not saying these are great arguments for why the US should be shouldering far too much of NATO’s economical burden - I’m just saying that these are massive debates in each of the 21 countries, all of them bringing a lot of individual baggage into their discussion.
Germans are leery of militarization, Italian constitution imposes some degree of pacifism, the southern countries are still reeling from the Euro Crisis and massive unemployment, countries that border Turkey have shifted a lot of attention over to border security and immigration control and so on and so forth.
I think the US and NATO should keep up the pressure, over time, but not force the issue. That would not end well.
Sure, but the entire US Atlantic Fleet(Fleet Forces Command) covers the North Atlantic.
Beyond that, I was talking in terms of total navy size; the US Navy dwarfs the rest of NATO combined.
Hey how is 2013?
While we’re at it, let’s ensure that Japan gets nukes. (As Trump wishes.)
Some people don’t know much history.
I think Greece spends a lot of money on their military for historical reasons, and the country they’ve come closest to conflict with in modern (post-WWII) history was a fellow NATO member.
They probably already have em. And, since the Chinese have nukes, the Japanese should have them too. Indeed, some people don’t know much history.
Yes, and if you think Japan has nuclear weapons, you are one of those people.