Donald Trump made the contributions of NATO allies a part of his campaign, so it’s not surprising that when newly minted Defense Secretary Jim Mattis addressed that organization, his comments leaned heavily on finances.
U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Wednesday issued a sharp ultimatum to NATO Wednesday, telling allies they must start increasing defense spending by year's end or the Trump administration will "moderate its commitment" to them.
How much are NATO members required to put into defense? There actually is no number. Under Article 3, all NATO members are required to “maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack” and there is a general target of 2 percent of the overall budget for defense spending. However, that 2 percent is just a guideline with neither penalties nor enforcement mechanisms. While the military spending of most members has increased in recent years, only 5 of the 27 NATO member states actually reach that number, and one of those is Greece, whose spending is not completely under its own control.
The warning reflects Trump's wish for greater sharing of military costs. Trump has rattled European nations by suggesting the U.S. might not defend allies unwilling to fulfill their financial obligations as NATO members.
A rattled NATO also means an emboldened Putin, who has stepped up attacks in Ukraine and moved forces to the borders of Baltic states since Trump took the helm.
But while Trump is badgering allies to spend more of their own money on the military, he’s not proposing to make any cuts in the United States. In fact, he’s promising the opposite. While the United States already spends more than the next eight nations combined on the military, Trump spent his campaign calling our military a “disaster” and promising a great rebuilding that has already taken the form of an executive order.
So Trump is demanding that other nations spend more … but at the same time promising that the US will spend even more than it already does. Which raises the question: Why?
Trump’s promise to greatly expand the military includes new ships, more planes, additional soldiers, and even (despite treaties) more missiles and nuclear warheads. If Trump was promising cuts in the US military while asking allies to pick up more of the slack, it might make sense. But badgering allies into spending more, at the same time that Trump is promising to vastly increase US military spending … how does anyone gain by that?
There’s also a slight problem that much of what Trump is asking is politically impossible. Strangely enough, most nations don’t have a political party insisting that 57 percent of non-mandatory spending go to the military. Germany currently spends just over 1 percent of its budget on the military, and the idea of spending much more is highly unpopular.
Mattis’s speech puts a deadline of “the end of the year,” but this is an election year in Germany. The odds that anyone in Germany will both win office and increase the military budget by the levels Mattis and Trump are demanding is somewhere less than zero.
Ten countries spend even less [than Germany], and seven — including Canada, Italy and Spain — would have to virtually double military spending to reach the target. One, Luxembourg, would require a four-fold increase to get close.
Perhaps the one thing that those eight nations have in common is no one running for public office who is promising to spend two to four times as much on the military. Well … that, and a universal disdain for Donald Trump.
Note: updated to clarify obligations of NATO members.