European citizens have once again been treated to the spectacle of Donald Trump openly denouncing NATO, attacking European countries for their supposed failure to properly pay for the alliance and announcing to the world that he would actively encourage an aggressor to move in and attack Europe.
This is merely the latest escalation of one of Trump’s favourite themes: the idea that European countries don’t pay their ‘dues’ to NATO. His argument is that many countries do not meet the NATO goal of spending at least 2% of GDP on defence. As a result, Trump says the US is being taken advantage of and should not feel any obligation to help these countries in the event of an attack, directly contradicting the principle of collective defence that underpins NATO.
Obviously, this whole line of logic is flawed. There are no payments owed by any country to anyone else in NATO; the funds are purely for countries to spend on their own militaries. Nor is the 2% figure a kind of minimum requirement - it was agreed as a goal but has no force beyond that and is not a legal part of the NATO treaties. Meanwhile, the US has never believed in NATO as an act of charity. Washington has traditionally supported the alliance because it has been seen as a critical foundation for the defence of American interests in the world, including by deterring Russia and maintaining a free, democratic Europe. And as for collective defence itself, let’s not forget that America is the only NATO country to have ever actually invoked that clause, when it called upon allies to join it in Afghanistan after 9/11 (which they duly did).
However, there is little point in going over this. Trump is wrong, water is wet. If mere ignorance of how international relations work were a major obstacle, Trump would not have been elected the first time round.
The original sin is really that the 2% target was ever created at all.
This may seem like an odd argument - the intentions of the target were perfectly sound after all and why shouldn’t everyone contribute to the maintenance of the alliance? The Americans had legitimate concerns that other countries were deprioritising defence spending because they were confident that the US, with its massive defence budget, would step in regardless. Moreover, from the perspective of any individual non-American country, your own contribution was so small compared to the size of the US military that it was easy to argue that it wouldn’t make much difference.
But the problem is that it solidified the idea that NATO was in some sense transactional. It helped foster this notion that NATO was an exchange, where a country could receive US protection in return for spending a certain amount of money on defence.
It also reinforced the individualised perspectives of other countries beyond the US. Countries that only thought of their own contribution and minimised its importance in the context of the broader alliance had that perspective validated. With the 2% target, all that mattered was their own little part of the pie, not the collective contribution of non-American (and essentially European) countries.
Finally, the very idea of a simple monetary target is flawed. When it comes to public procurement and services, not all spending is equal. Some may add a lot to NATO’s military capability but others not so much.
Britain is a good example of how a strong focus on the 2% target as a contextless number can hinder progress in plugging NATO’s holes. The UK has been one of the leaders in Europe when it comes to meeting the target and politicians have made it a point of pride. Yet our actual military capability has been steadily worn away. Today the British military faces a recruitment crisis, poor morale, a dearth of functional ships for our navy and billions wasted on failed projects. As far as some in the US are concerned, Britain is not that much better than Italy or Germany, countries which have consistently failed to meet the 2% threshold.
Still, even if it the 2% goal is flawed and should never have been established, there’s no chance of it being abolished now.
So, where do we go from here?
The best alternative is to change the goal to something more useful. There are a couple ways this could happen.
First, the goal should be collective for all European countries. Rather than thinking about each individual contribution, it makes more sense to address the elephant in the room: the imbalance between the US and Europe. This would push European leaders to think about their contribution to NATO on the proper scale, encourage more collaboration and incentivise the reduction in unnecessary overlap and duplication. It would also help Europe to more readily think of its combined defence force as a single entity and how that entity might operate if, in the worst case scenario, the US really did resile from its NATO commitments.
This approach would create the risk of free-riding within Europe, as some countries do more than others, but this is a problem that is easier to solve. For one thing, the interests in mutual defence are much more direct, meaning there is less risk of a country declining to defend another from an outside aggressor. For another, mismatches in military contribution can be balanced through other areas of European countries’ extensive internal links and shared policies. This is a kind of conflict management that is much harder to do with the more distant US.
Second, there should be a move away from just a monetary target. As explained in the British case, defence spending is not the same as military capacity. NATO does not need the right numbers on a spreadsheet, it needs tanks and soldiers, shells and warships. These are the ways that contributions to NATO should be measured. A funding target can be maintained as an additional metric but it should lose its totemic value. Such a shift would also reduce the transactional feeling that has developed in recent years.
Overall, instead of each country being assessed on whether they individually spend 2% of their GDP on defence, all of Europe should be assessed on its real military capacity and how it compares to the US. It need not be a perfect match (US GDP is much bigger after all) but it should be on a similar level and make sense as its own fighting force.
Even this reform is doubtless not perfect but it could eliminate some of the failures of the worn-out 2% goal, still responding to American concerns around free-riding and helping Europe plan its re-armament in a more sensible way. Where the 2% policy was simply about balancing contributions, a reformed approach can more readily meet the much broader challenges of a more dangerous world.
Third. The contribution towards international security should be taken more broadly than investment in weaponry aka 'defence'. The international aid budget should be pooled in to the budget target as it is contributing to the same ends through different means. Aid+Military=2% would be a start but there are more interesting conversations to be had on this front.