NATO’s slide into dependency, now in graph form

One of the lesser-discussed obligations of NATO membership is that member states have agreed to spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense every year. The main reason why this is hardly ever mentioned is that, of NATO’s 28 members, only maybe 3-4, max, are likely to meet that target in any given year. This underspending on defense has been threatening to turn NATO from a mutual treaty organization into a giant US protectorate for a while now, since the US, which is the alliance’s largest economy by far (Germany has the world’s fourth-largest economy, but it’s maybe a fifth the size of America’s) and annually spends 3-4% of its GDP on defense, accounts now for 3/4 or more of the alliance’s overall defense spending. It’s been argued that the 2% threshold is silly and should be eliminated, but that argument usually comes from countries that almost certainly spend far less on defense than they would if they weren’t absolutely sure that the US would come to their aid should they ever face a serious threat.

To wit, Kevin Drum flagged these two charts from a recent Pew poll of the citizens of NATO member states:

The upshot here, going strictly by public opinion, is that if, say, Latvia or Estonia are ever invaded by Russia, they can expect NATO to come to their aid, but it will probably only be the US and Canada, and maybe the UK and Poland, that respond, while Germany, for one, is likely to tell them to buzz off. But Germany will expect the US to come to the Baltic States’ aid, and if Russia rolls through Eastern Europe and winds up on Germany’s borders, you can be damn sure that there are going to be a mess of Germans demanding immediate US intervention to stop this craziness. NATO isn’t supposed to work like this. It’s supposed to be a mutual defense arrangement, not an excuse for a bunch of European countries to stop paying for their own defense and nestle themselves underneath an American shield.

It should be emphasized that this is a poll of public opinion, which doesn’t necessarily track with how the governments of those countries will respond if a situation like my hypothetical above actually arises. The German government could well choose to uphold its obligations regardless of public sentiment against it. But given that these countries are all democracies, and so the public’s opinion does (and should) matter, these attitudes are worrying. Embedded in those two charts that Drum flagged is an almost arrogant presumption that American soldiers and American citizens should shoulder burdens under the NATO alliance that the rest of NATO’s members wouldn’t touch, despite the fact that they’re all equally obligated to shoulder them. It’s not healthy for the US or for NATO.