ANALYSIS – This weekend, former President Donald Trump remarked that he might let “delinquent” NATO members get invaded by Russia and even encourage it. And by delinquent, Trump meant not paying their minimum NATO required share of at least 2% of GDP on defense.
Specifically, Trump told supporters at a campaign rally a possibly true tale about the time he told a European leader that the U.S. would not protect a European country from Russian invasion if it had failed to meet NATO's defense spending goal.
“In fact,” Trump said, “I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.”
The reaction was angry and immediate. The Joe Biden White House swiftly called Trump's comments “appalling and unhinged.”
But are they really? Or is Trump on to something?
At first glance Trump's remarks may sound nuts to many of us brought up on the notion of collective defense as embodied in Article 5 of the NATO charter – “an attack on any one member is an attack on all.”
This generally means the U.S. coming to help defend Europe, including with nukes if necessary. But NATO isn't only about that.
Collective self-defense also presupposes collective shared responsibility, as in each member paying their fair share of the group effort. In the NATO case it is simply 2% of GDP on defense for every member, which is small and proportional to the member's economies.
And the fact is that most members haven't been shouldering their burden.
But Trump isn't the first American leader to complain.
Daniel DePetris notes in The Spectator:
In November 1959, ten years after NATO's creation, then-president Dwight D. Eisenhower told one of his generals that European members were in essence playing the US for fools. A decade later, defense secretary Melvin Laird wrote to Richard Nixon that the US “has told its Allies for the past several years that they can and should take over a greater share of Europe's direct defense.” Ditto Barack Obama, who bluntly told the Atlantic during an… interview that “free riders aggravate me.”
Since then, Europe has only grown much bigger, more unified and far wealthier. This, as the old Soviet threat withered. Still, as De Petris adds:
While Americans may not want the US to get out of NATO, they do find it objectionable that the US is doing most of the legwork in keeping Europe whole, free and at peace while the rest of the alliance — Britain, Poland and the Baltic states excluded — basically resembles a bunch of twenty-five-year-old couch potatoes sitting in their parents' basement, taking indefinite support for granted.
Sure, this analogy will make a lot of Europeans upset, but how else to describe a situation in which almost two-thirds of NATO members are still failing to meet NATO's 2 percent of GDP metric nearly seventeen years after it was first established?
To believe a continent with a $17 trillion GDP doesn't have the financial resources to fulfill those obligations is ludicrous, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise.
And that is the same now with helping defend Ukraine. I have repeatedly argued that the U.S. should help support Ukraine, but Europe must lead the way and pay their equal or larger share.
So, Trump has resorted to “shock therapy.”
As Ross Clark writes separately in The Spectator:
…someone has to shock NATO's laggards into keeping their side of the bargain. Trump has tried this tactic before, at the 2018 NATO summit in Brussels, when he described Germany as a “captive of Russia” owing to its decision to spend billions on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to import Russian gas, while spending only 1.23 percent of GDP on defense.
Not only was Trump proved right about the pipeline and Germany's reliance on Russian gas — but his shock tactic of suggesting that the US might lose patience with defending Europe did have some effect. At the time of the 2018 summit only four countries were meeting the two percent target… Five countries were spending less than 1 percent, including the summit host Belgium… Most member states had failed to take any notice of Barack Obama's polite requests to take their defense more seriously. Since 2018, however, a further six countries have hit the 2 percent target.
So, Trump's tactic has worked before, as many were loath to admit. However, this time his remarks may be very different.
The trouble with Trump's remarks about Putin, however, are that they do not amount to an idle threat; rather they are an invitation to a villain who doesn't need much in the way of encouragement. That is an argument for saying that Trump really has overstepped the mark this time and put Europe in peril.
But if his remarks do as intended and quickly jolt recalcitrant NATO members into action to beef up their defenses then hopefully the end result might be to make Putin less inclined to strike. Not for the first time, Trump's sheer unpredictability may prove to have its uses.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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