NATO - US: A False and Dysfunctional Approach to Burden-Sharing

NATO and the Claim the U.S. Bears 70% of the Burden: a False and Dysfunctional Approach to Burden-Sharing (excerpt)

By Anthony H. Cordesman

Not without cause, the furore over President Trump's meeting with Putin has focused on Russia. The fact remains, however, that the NATO Summit meeting and its aftermath may well have been equally, or more, destructive to the security interests of the U.S. and its allies. The day-to-day jockeying for position between the U.S. and Russia is one thing. Undermining the unity and strength of the NATO alliance is quite another.

Part of the potential destructiveness of the NATO Summit meeting lay in the uncertainty of the President's commitment to NATO. On the one hand, he signed a Summit statement that strongly supported the alliance. On the other hand, he also implied that he might make serious force cuts if nations like Germany did not spend more. He also questioned the U.S. commitment to Montenegro. When a Fox News commentator asked him "Why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack?" The President replied, "I understand what you're saying. I've asked the same question."

While it was certainly unintentional, his response did bear an unfortunate similarity to Neville Chamberlin's famous statement about Czechoslovakia at the time of the Munich crisis in 1938, "a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing..."

What may do more lasting damage is the debate over NATO burdening sharing.

President Trump seems to have relied on an approach to measuring NATO burden sharing that he inherited from NATO and past Presidents. One key aspect of this is an approach that focuses on statistically meaningless national goals like making defense spending reach at least 2% of GDP, and allocating 20% of defense spending to equipment rather than creating the strategy, forces, and military capabilities the Alliance actually needs.

It takes time to explain just how stupid and irrelevant these two goals are to U.S. and NATO security needs – and such an analysis is available in Burke Chair report entitled, NATO “Burden Sharing”: The Need for Strategy and Force Plans, Not Meaningless Percentage Goals, Third Major Revision, July 19, 2018.

Total U.S. Defense Spending is Not a Meaningful or Honest Estimate of the Burden

At the same time, the President has relied heavily on a NATO assessment of the total cost to the U.S. of its role in NATO that is both false and dysfunctional. NATO released updated defense expenditure data the day before the Summit meeting that again showed that total U.S. defense spending has been nearly equal to 70% of the total defense spending of all the countries in the Alliance for well over a decade.

If one uses the average percentages of U.S. spending as a percent of total NATO spending, the NATO defense spending data do seem to indicate that the U.S. spends an average of around 70%.

This figure would indicate that the U.S. is spending far more on Europe's defense than Europe, and bears far too much of the "burden." However, these NATO data ignore the fact that almost all European spending is spent on national defense in Europe. It ignores the fact that the U.S. is a global superpower that serves its own interests by spending on U.S. forces and capabilities that meet many other U.S. strategic objectives and that are designed primarily for other missions and regions. (end of excerpt)

Click here for the full story (4 PDF pages) on the CSIS website.

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