President Trump’s Monday morning tweets confirm that he’s going into this week’s NATO summit ready to berate our allies for spending too little on defense.
The real story: While European defense spending has fallen in recent decades, the U.S. has also drastically reduced its own military commitment to NATO since the Cold War. Europe was largely de-militarized in the 1990s, and every NATO member, including the U.S., took advantage of it.
Trump has focused on Germany’s defense budget, and he may know that Germany’s army — at 175,000 troops — is only half what it was 25 years ago. But the U.S. presence in Europe is down even more — 75% across the board, including troops, planes, ships, tanks and bases. (Tank numbers were actually down to zero in 2013; they started returning two years ago.)
Where it stands: Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014 was a wake-up call for NATO, and almost every member answered it, pledging to increase defense spending up to 2% of GDP within a decade. Since then, European NATO members as a group have increased their military budgets by more than 10%. (The U.S. figure is essentially the same.) Germany’s increase last year was 6%, which Chancellor Merkel admitted this weekend was “not nearly enough.” Meanwhile, the Pentagon has proposed a $1.7 billion funding increase next year for military upgrades that it says will help to deter Russia — but that’s not nearly enough to do so, either.
The big picture: For a quarter of a century, NATO members, the U.S. included, acted as though European security wasn’t a serious problem. Now, they’ve decided it is. The alliance has adjusted slowly to this new reality, but budgets, capabilities, deployments and strategies are all changing. This week’s summit presents a chance to lock in a new consensus, but the opportunity may pass if Trump doesn’t acknowledge it.
Stephen Sestanovich is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, professor of international diplomacy at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and author of “Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama.”
