Secretary Mattis has put NATO on notice that we expect them to increase their defense spending. Is there anything to the notion that our NATO allies aren’t pulling their weight?
Well, US presidents have been complaining for decades that our NATO allies don’t spend enough on defense, but they’ve never done anything about it. Why? Because we don’t really want them to spend much more on defense; it’s not in our national interest. At least not in the most cynical and self-serving conception of our national interest.
To understand why, let’s look at just one of the reasons we spend so much more on our military than anyone else: aircraft carriers. If you count all the aircraft carriers in the world there’s 40 of them, operated by 14 countries. Twenty seven are small carriers (about 30,000 — 40,000 tons), which are used to provide helicopter support for antisubmarine warfare and amphibious landings. 9 of those 27 small carriers are operated by the United States.
3 of the world’s 40 carriers are “fleet” carriers — at 50,000 tons roughly the displacement of a WW2 Iowa class battleship. Fleet carriers are designed to project national power. Only France, Russia and China operate fleet carriers, although the Admiral Kuznetsov is notoriously unreliable and China’s Liaoning has only just reached initial operating capability. But for sake of argument we’ll count them as fully operational.
That leaves 10 “supercarriers” — ships of staggering size, cost, and complexity that displace a 100,000 tons and cost over ten billion dollars apiece. The function of a supercarrier is to project overwhelming force, to be the irresistible mailed fist of a global hyper-power. And the United States operates all ten of the world’s supercarriers. In total US supercarriers can move 800 fixed wing aircraft; if you count assault aircraft that could in theory be carried on our amphibious assault ships that number becomes 1000. The most fixed-wing aircraft any other country can transport by carrier is 50, total. Most countries with carriers can only transport helicopters.
What this illustrates is that the military budgets of the US and its allies aren’t really comparable. Our allies are spending for defense, we are spending for global dominance.
A world where our NATO allies spent similarly to us would look very different, as the following table shows:
NATO Countries GDP (millions)
United states |
16,348,875 |
45% |
All non-US NATO MEMBERS |
19,862,626
|
55% |
TOTAL |
36,211,501 |
100% |
The US actually represents less than half of all NATO GDP. If you imagine a world in which NATO allies “pulled their weight” equally to the US, our allies would out-pull us. Of course nobody’s talking about that happening, but how far down that road do we want to go?
It seems to me this effort to get our NATO allies to spend more on their military isn’t very well thought-out. What are they trying to accomplish? Reducing US military budgets? Somehow I doubt it. Move that budget where it will do our national interests more good? Well, consider what the status quo does for our military interests: we can operate without the support of our allies, but they can’t operate much outside their own territories without us. We have practical veto over any attempt by Europe to project power because they rely on us for most of the stuff they’d need to do that.
On the other hand our NATO allies still add considerably to our military might. Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty has only been invoked once, in response to 9/11. Subsequently almost exactly 1/3 of the casualties in Afghanistan were borne by our coalition allies. Without NATO it’s safe to say we’d have had 50% more casualties.
In other words from a purely selfish, jingoistic, America-first standpoint, the status quo serves us pretty well. But then why do Americans presidents always complain about this? Because its a not-to-subtle way to remind our friends who’s the boss and why.
I don’t think people who have suddenly discovered this issue realize that if our allies become more independent of us, they’ll be more inclined to question, even challenge our leadership. That’s arguably a good thing, but that’s probably not what they have in mind. In fact I doubt they have any idea what they want to accomplish at all.