Posting #18: The Story of NATO and Donald Trump
THE STORY: Donald Trump, who was the US president from 2017-2021 and is running for office again in 2024, claimed at a February 2024 campaign rally that if a NATO country had not paid its “bills,” as president he would refuse not only to protect the country from a Russian invasion, he would invite Russia “to do whatever the hell they want.”
Trump’s ranting about money—the “bills”—is not a new tale. He has consistently railed against the finances of NATO, and has been reported as saying to his high-ranking aides several times over the course of 2018 that he wanted to withdraw the United States from the now 75-year-old alliance. In mid-2020 and at the potential cost of several billion dollars, he also commanded that nearly 12,000 American troops stationed in Germany be withdrawn because of Germany’s “delinquency on paying their bills.” (Biden subsequently rescinded the order.)
What is new is the invitation for Russia to invade a NATO country. Trump’s “America First” unilateralist agenda rejects the notion of collaborative alliances generally, but NATO and its expansions in particular is anathema to his good friend Vladimir Putin, who wants to reinstate the Russian Empire. The weakening of or end of NATO would facilitate Putin’s desire.
MY TAKE ON THE STORY: I am influenced by my own family’s relationship to NATO. As a US Army officer, my father served in NATO twice, in the 1960s when we lived in still-recovering-from-World-War West Germany, and in the 1980s, when he worked at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Mons, Belgium. Five of his children—four daughters (including me) and one son—also served as US Army officers in NATO during the 1970s and 80s, before the fall of the Soviet Union. We were medical, engineering, air defense, and intelligence officers, and all of us were fulfilling obligations to US taxpayers who had paid for our college educations. From my point of view as a child who lived in West Germany and as an Army tactical military intelligence officer who prepared to face East German and Soviet forces coming through the Fulda Gap, it is hard to imagine the United States withdrawing from a 75-year-old alliance that has not only kept the peace in a nuclear world after two world wars, but also expands the launching sites for the globally-oriented US armed forces. What is the organization, though, what does it cost, and does it make sense to remain a standing member?
What is NATO?
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded in 1949, after a series of post-World War II events caused European countries and the United States to become concerned about the growing divisions between eastern and western Europe. Civil war in Greece, tensions in Turkey, growing communism in Czechoslovakia and Italy, the Soviet blockade of West Berlin, and the Soviet refusal of Marshall Plan assistance to the Soviet Union or its satellite states all:
caused U.S. officials to grow increasingly wary of the possibility that the countries of Western Europe might deal with their security concerns by negotiating with the Soviets. To counter this possible turn of events, the Truman Administration considered the possibility of forming a European-American alliance that would commit the United States to bolstering the security of Western Europe. (emphasis added)
Furthermore, Western Europe had been decimated by World War II, limiting hopes for unity and cooperation that would heal the ruptures of war. The NATO website explains its origins:
[T]he Alliance’s creation was part of a broader effort to serve three purposes: deterring Soviet expansionism, forbidding the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe through a strong North American presence on the continent, and encouraging European political integration.
The aftermath of World War II saw much of Europe devastated in a way that is now difficult to envision. Approximately 36.5 million Europeans had died in the conflict, 19 million of them civilians. Refugee camps and rationing dominated daily life. In some areas, infant mortality rates were one in four. Millions of orphans wandered the burnt-out shells of former metropolises. In the German city of Hamburg alone, half a million people were homeless. (emphasis added)
It was, then, the United States that engineered the transatlantic alliance, and it was Michigan’s Republican Senator Arthur H. Vandenburg who proposed in 1948 that Democratic President Truman seek a security treaty with Western Europe that would exist outside of the UN Security Council where the Soviet Union held veto power. The Vandenburg Resolution passed in the Senate, and extensive negotiations began for the North Atlantic Treaty. The twelve founding nations included the United States, Denmark, Belgium, Iceland (which has never had a standing army), Canada, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Norway, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. In the 1950s, Greece, Turkey, and West Germany joined, Spain joined in 1982, and following the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, former Soviet satellites began to join. With the addition of Sweden in recent days and a long-standing-neutral country, Finland, in 2023 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO now includes 32 members.
Is Trump the first president to complain about NATO?
No.
As a matter of fact, all the presidents since the alliance’s foundation have complained about NATO allies and the financial cost of the alliance to the United States, or “burden-sharing.” It was not until after the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea, then part of Ukraine, that NATO allies agreed to each try to spend 2% of GDP on national defense. So for most of the alliance’s history, there were few monetary targets to be spent by each ally on its defense forces, giving most US presidents plenty of anguish.
In 2017’s “A History of Vexation: Trump’s Bashing of NATO is Nothing New,” historians Michael Creswell and Victor Gavin enumerate the many complaints made by presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, and those made by other politicians from both sides of the aisle: Mike Mansfield, Barney Frank, Robert Gates, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders. “Bashing NATO,” the historians conclude, “is a familiar American script. The only difference this time is that it’s being delivered by the ultimate anti-hero.” By 2018, the year when Trump was suggesting to aides that the United States should withdraw from NATO, pundits were discussing how presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama had both been frustrated that NATO allies were not spending more of their GDP on defense. “Trump is pushing NATO allies to spend more on defense. But so did Obama and Bush” makes clear, though, how, unlike previous presidents, Trump fundamentally had got the finances wrong. At the 2018 NATO Summit in Brussels:
Trump repeatedly spoke about defense spending as if NATO countries owed the United States the money they had not decided to spend on their own domestic defense budgets, and as if the 2 percent of GDP that is the target for each country all goes into one pot and the U.S. has been paying other countries’ share of the pot.
This is simply not the case.
How is NATO financed?
As I understand it, there are two distinct components to NATO’s finances. First, all members contribute to a common, cost-sharing fund that pays for things like running NATO headquarters, joint operations and early warning systems, and airfields, harbors, and fuel supplies. According to the BBC, “the cost sharing is based on national income” or GDP, a formula agreed upon by all members. The United States has, therefore, always paid more than other allies into the fund because we have an exponentially larger GDP. Recently, however, the US has been given a break.
In 2023, for instance, the United States’ GDP exceeded the combined national incomes of the 30-or-so other members. Still, under previous pressure from Trump, the United States was given a “sweetheart deal” that meant it paid no more than the ally with the second-highest GDP. Consequently, from 2021-2024, Germany and the United States each have paid just over 16% of the total annual NATO budget ($3.5B). By my inexpert calculations, this means the US has paid about $560M annually, or much less than 1% of the US annual defense budget.
Second, since 2014 and Russia’s invasion of Crimea, each ally country has agreed, in good faith, to try to spend 2% of their GDP on their national defense budget. (At that point, only three allies were committing that much to their national defense budgets.) Contrary to Trump’s story that conflates the two components, this is NOT a common fund, this is NOT a fee paid to the United States, and there is no alliance-enforced penalty for not achieving the target amount. Again, according to the BBC,
Nato [sic] estimates for 2023 suggest that Poland was the top spender, allocating 3.9% of GDP (the total value of goods produced and services), which was more than twice the amount it had spent in 2022. The US was in second place, spending 3.5%, which is about the same level as it has been spending for the last decade. In total, 11 of the 31 Nato members spent more than 2%, with the average for Nato members in Europe and Canada estimated at 1.74%...[This represents an increase in European and Canadian defense spending] over the last ten years.”
And according to the US Defense Department, as of February 2024, 18 allies were committing to spend at least 2% in the coming year. We can conclude, then, that this increase in defense spending reflects decisions made by NATO allies preceding Trump’s presidency, his threats notwithstanding.
Re-do the metrics to reflect “responsibility sharing”
What is different between the United States and the other 30-some NATO members is not only that it has an exponentially larger GDP, but the United States is also a global superpower with military commitments around the world, not only in the NATO arena. That 3.5% of US GDP spent on defense cited above does not go to NATO alone—far from it. The US has alliances across the globe to which it contributes, so saying that it contributes 3.5% of GDP to NATO is grossly inaccurate. Some scholars argue, then, that “burden-sharing,” the phrase used previously to describe contributions to NATO, should be revised to reflect a more accurate situation: “responsibility sharing.”
As a 2018 report from the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) written by Anthony H. Cordesman claims, the “US is a global superpower that serves its own interests by spending on US forces and capabilities that meet many other US strategic objectives and that are designed primarily for other missions and regions.” Furthermore, Cordesman argues that after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was the United States that took the largest “peace dividend” of all the NATO countries, reducing troop numbers by 85% and sites by 75%. Meanwhile, the European allies did not do that. In 2018, they actually had a larger number of active-duty soldiers than THE ENTIRE US FORCE and the Europeans are spending more and more every year on what they call “resilience.” In his CSIS report (CSIS is a bi-partisan American think tank), Cordesman subsequently advises that a metric other than military spending should be employed to reflect the contributions of NATO members to transatlantic security.
Another CSIS study, this one published in 2024, is entitled “Pulling Their Weight: The Data on NATO Responsibility Sharing.” It contends that the metric currently used to gauge contributions to NATO is inaccurate because “burden-sharing” “does not adequately capture all the different ways that allies are spending their resources on capabilities and programs that improve transatlantic security writ large.” “In other words,” the four authors write,
an expanded definition of what countries can count as contributions toward transatlantic security is needed since the international security environment is one in which the lines between domestic and foreign policy are being blurred, and defense spending is necessary but not sufficient to meet national security requirements.
They argue for a “whole-of-government” approach that responds to a variety of “hybrid and political warfare” against alliance members. Thus, “an analysis of responsibility sharing should include not only direct defense expenditures but also investments in resilience and select adjacent sectors.” The study provides a few current examples beyond defense spending that might count toward responsibility sharing:
· Public order and safety expenditures: police, firefighting, judicial systems, and Research and Development (R&D) related to public order and safety. These “are essential for national resilience in the event of a crisis.”
· Support for Ukraine: military, financial, and humanitarian aid
· The cost of pivoting away from Russian energy sources, due to sanctions imposed by NATO and the EU
The study also suggests other areas that might be termed responsibility sharing: cyber protection of critical national infrastructure, rail infrastructure, airport maintenance, climate change response, maritime response, special weapons storage, and fuel and ammunitions depots. Once these types of activities are seen as contributing to NATO, the study finds that many allies are spending well over 3% of GDP and shifting away from Russian energy sources has come at great cost. Including all these factors will, the authors contend, add value to the alliance and acknowledge allies’ many contributions to transatlantic security.
So what? Why stay in NATO?
Unsurprisingly, Americans are divided mostly along partisan lines about continuing NATO membership. With the fall of the Soviet Union—the ostensible reason for NATO’s existence—many think NATO has done its job and needs to be retired. In fact, aside from prevaricating about the finances, in 2017 Trump sent double messages about the alliance’s viability, calling it within a few months both “obsolete” and “not obsolete,” no doubt confusing his followers. According to a February 2024 New York Times article, while “80 percent of Democrats believe the United States benefits from alliances with Europe, just 50 percent of Republicans do, according to surveys released in October.” There are further divisions within the Republican party related to supporting Ukraine, an aspiring EU and NATO member, with only “40 percent of Trump Republicans support[ing] military aid for Ukraine, while 59 percent of those identifying as non-Trump Republicans favor[ing] it, nearly the same as the 63 percent level among the overall public.”
But I think NATO is neither obsolete nor lifeless. It was not designed only to counter the Soviet Union and to douse any resurgent nationalist militarism in Europe but also to “encourag[e] European political integration.” And that’s where I think NATO’s true value is, as Ellen Hallams puts it in “The Transatlantic Alliance Renewed: the United States and NATO since 9/11”: the value is “in the integrated military command and political decision-making structures that were unique to the NATO alliance.” Few collaborations/alliances have been so successful at keeping the peace and for so long, especially in a world precariously peppered with nuclear weapons.
The US Department of Defense says as much in 2022: “The United States has an abiding national security interest in a stable, integrated European region. The political and military presence of the US and of NATO fosters the conditions necessary to ensure that democratic and market-based institutions can flourish across the region.” Most importantly, though,
These [US monetary] contributions are necessary to allow the US to participate in and have a voice in NATO priorities and efforts, not only on military capabilities, but also on wider policy issues. The United States leads the key discussions within NATO, and the US contribution to common funded programs is essential to a continued leadership role.” (emphasis added)
In short, with its membership in NATO, the US purchases its access to European matters.
Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic has written that not only will Trump’s invitation for Russia to invade a NATO country encourage Russia to continue its war in Ukraine, but also the United States’ leaving NATO would compel other NATO allies to do what NATO was designed to prevent: “cozy up to Russia,” with its authoritarian system. And that, Applebaum points out, would weaken the US membership in any other alliances. Who would trust American commitments if it withdraws from NATO and encourages Russia to invade? Trade agreements would wither, and the US economy would falter and shrink. If you think inflation is out of control now, imagine that.
Ivo Dalder, the chief executive of the Chicago Council, has this to say about Trump:
Trump is unlike any Republican Party leader since the 1930s. Trump was the first postwar president not to embrace America’s global leadership role — rejecting security alliances, open markets and the defense of democracy and human rights that have been at the very core of American foreign policy since 1945, supported by presidents of both parties.
Trump’s so-called leadership has had enormous repercussions for the United States writ large. A November 2020 Pew report entitled “The Trump Era Has Seen a Decline in America’s Global Reputation,” finds that
Trump’s unpopularity has had a significant negative effect on America’s overall image. Ratings for the United States plummeted after he took office in 2017, and they have declined further over the past year, at least in part due to the widespread perception that the U.S. has handled the coronavirus pandemic poorly. In fact, in several nations that are key U.S. allies and partners, the share of the public with a favorable view of the U.S. is at its lowest point in nearly two decades of polling.
Despite the intervening years since he first alleged “delinquent bill-payers” among NATO allies, Candidate Trump continues to repeat this false story on the campaign trail. Whatever the case for the businessman-turned-politician’s repeated prevarication—either his refusal to understand how NATO is financed, his pandering to his too-ready-to-be-aggrieved American base, his being compromised in some way by the former-KGB-agent Putin, or worse, pandering to the Russian autocrat he emulates—it is astonishing. More, that he encouraged Russia to attack NATO allies who he claimed were delinquent on their “bills” is flagrantly irresponsible and certainly traitorous for ANY American who wants to wear the mantle of leader, let alone Commander-in-Chief.