Trump Must Stand His Ground with NATO

Ted Galen Carpenter

Security, Europe

Trump should make good on his word and cut off NATO allies that refuse to pull their weight.

President Trump’s tense meeting with German chancellor Angela Merkel confirmed that he is serious about insisting on greater financial burden sharing within NATO. Not only did the president criticize Germany’s continuing failure to meet the commitment that alliance members made following the 2006 summit meeting to spend a minimum of 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense, but he added another barb. Trump stated that Merkel’s government owed NATO (and, by implication, the United States as NATO’s leader) “vast sums” of money for the prior years that Germany failed to meet the 2 percent target. German officials flatly rejected both his demand and his reasoning, even arguing that difference in the relative expenditures of alliance members should not really matter to the collective defense effort.

This was hardly the first time that a U.S. administration has pressed for greater burden sharing from NATO’s European members. As I’ve noted previously, Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, threatened to conduct an “agonizing reappraisal” of Washington’s commitment to Europe’s security if allies did not do more. More recently, Barack Obama’s secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel, warned that European nations must increase their defense efforts, or domestic support for America’s NATO obligations would be in jeopardy.

U.S. officials undercut their own warnings, however, by simultaneously stressing the importance of Europe’s security to America’s own. When those officials habitually asserted that the continent’s well-being was not merely an important U.S. interest, but a vital one, European leaders understandably dismissed the accompanying warnings as lacking credibility. They either ignored the demand for greater burden sharing or (as in 2006) made paper promises for a greater effort, which they then promptly violated.

Alan Tonelson, a former associate editor with Foreign Policy, aptly identified the inherent futility of Washington’s burden-sharing approach.

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