Do Europeans support NATO? They certainly fret a lot about the future of the Atlantic Alliance. To hear them tell it, a return of Donald Trump to the White House next January would augur cataclysm. “The anxiety is massive” according to a typical statement from European elites relayed by The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins. They fear the United States, the dominant member of the alliance, might throttle back its support for European security—retreating into isolationism, enacting soft-on-Russia policies, shifting military resources and policy energy to the Indo-Pacific to confront a domineering China, or some alloy of these. And Trump would almost certainly resume lambasting allies for free-riding on American-supplied defense. He would hector them publicly, early, and often to spend more—much as he did during his last tenure as president.
Europe stands to be the biggest loser from this fall’s U.S. elections.
But rather than concentrate on what Trump says, or what Europeans say about what he might do, why don’t we look at what Europe—and for that matter Canada, another laggard—does in the defense sphere. Communiques and public statements out of the recent 75th-anniversary summit in Washington DC put the accent on the positive. Quoth the official statement from allied capitals: “We welcome that more than two-thirds of Allies have fulfilled their commitment of at least 2% of GDP annual defence spending and commend those Allies who have exceeded it.” Flip that upbeat statement around. It means that a substantial minority of allies still are not spending 2 percent or more of GDP on their armed forces a decade after allied leaders resolved that all members would meet that standard within a decade.
Meaning by now. Fail.
It’s worth pointing out what a low standard 2 percent of GDP for defense represents, and how the numerology of 2 percent clouds the true state of defense preparedness. Use Cold War America as a rough guide to how much it will run NATO to compete against malign great powers. The United States invested an average of about 6 percent of GDP in defense per annum across forty years of strategic competition against the Soviet Union. And that figure spiked during regional conflagrations in Korea and Vietnam. Preparing for war in order in hopes of keeping the peace will cost you. All alliance members—including the United States—need to embrace this basic reality.
Nor is the raw amount spent on defense a reliable gauge of working capability. It’s an input measure that says little about the prowess of forces raised, trained, and equipped for that sum. Some contenders—Japan, to name one—wring a lot of value out of modest expenditures. Others are less efficient at transforming latent into actual military power. Japan has to make do with less. It inhabits a tough neighborhood yet is constrained by its martial legacy. (You might make the same case for Germany.) But you can only reach the conclusion that Tokyo extracts disproportionate bang for the buck by undertaking exhaustive net assessment of the Japanese military, evaluating not just the matériel but human components of armed might. Same goes for any military.
Budgets do not go to war; armies, navies, and air forces do. Estimating how much military power European allies need to field to stand a reasonable chance of success against their chief antagonist, Russia, will reveal how much the common defense will cost them. The Russian military—not arbitrary spending figures—constitutes the true measure of NATO adequacy at arms.
Few would maintain that Europe is ready to shoulder primary responsibility for its own defense. So European magnates are right to worry about the scale of the U.S. transatlantic commitment and the burdens a drawdown would impose on the alliance’s European contingent. Nor is Trump’s victory or defeat this fall necessarily a decisive factor. Over the past decade-plus three different presidential administrations representing different political parties have vowed to pivot to Asia, there to curb the challenges posed by China. Trump’s manner is jarring in diplomatic affairs, no doubt about it. But don’t mistake style for substance. That the Pacific is now the primary locus of American purpose is a bipartisan verdict.
European rearmament has dawdled despite these discomfiting realities. That’s because rearmament faces cultural headwinds. Like Americans, Europeans deluded themselves that the Soviet Union’s downfall in 1991 spelled an end to strategic competition and warfare. History had ended. It takes time and effort to eradicate such deep-seated attitudes, even when strategic reality changes around a society. But the problem may run even deeper that that in Europe. Twenty-plus years ago Brookings Institution scholar Robert Kagan postulated that because of how the Cold War unfolded in Europe, Americans were in effect from Mars while Europeans hailed from Venus. In other words, Americans performed the bulk of the warlike functions necessary to ward off communism. U.S. largesse allowed Europeans to chronically underspend on defense.
Allies inhabited radically different worlds built on radically different assumptions. According to Kagan, Europeans came to believe security was something others provided as though by right. Free-riding was the natural order of things.
You can live on Venus, constructing lavish social-welfare systems and cherishing pacifist fantasies, so long as Mars is standing guard. Needless to say, this line of argument did not endear Kagan to Europeans. But it squares with my own observations as an old Cold Warrior who spent a fair amount of time in and around NATO-Europe. The cultural impediments Kagan espies also help explain why European efforts at rearmament have been so sluggish while the strategic setting morphs—and deteriorates—at breakneck speed.
Do Europeans support NATO? Listen to what they say. But watch what they do.
Dr. James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Nonresident Fellow at the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. The views voiced here are his alone.
