NATO bristles as Trumps demands members pay their ‘fair share’

The heads of state could be seen shifting awkwardly in place and some evening snickering as Trump delivered his speech demanding that members pay their “fair share” towards collective defense.

“Twenty-three of the 28 member nations are still not paying what they should be paying and what they are supposed to be paying for their defense,” Trump said. He then went on to claim that many of the nations “owe massive amounts of money from past years,” though the alliance is not based on members paying dues.

The president argued that NATO must make up for past military cuts and start spending 2 percent of GDP as “the bare minimum for confronting today’s very real and very vicious threats.”

Trump is not the first American leader to criticize NATO members for not carrying their weight in the military bloc. After the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on April 4, 1949, Dwight Eisenhower, America’s first Supreme Allied Commander to NATO, had to press the war-weary nations of Europe to contribute more to the collective defense.

Even during the Obama administration, as the U.S. put caps on its own defense spending, the president pushed European allies to stop cutting their military budgets. In 2014 Obama helped secure the commitment among all member states to invest 2 percent of GDP into defense spending.

Senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and career diplomat Steven Pifer said on Friday that while Trump’s message was appropriate, he made a “major mistake” diplomatically by publicly “castigating” NATO’s leaders.

“His position about asking allies to contribute more was the right position,” Pifer explained, “but the way he pressed his request was the wrong way to do it and I think will be less successful in eliciting the positive response that he wanted.” Rather than a public lecture, he said, Trump should have raised the issue in private.

In a Friday interview, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld defended Trump’s very public arm-twisting of NATO leaders.

“Those countries, for the most part, are simply not meeting the NATO target and they should,” Rumsfeld said in a CNN interview. “Someone needs to tell them that, and I’m glad he did it.”

More surprising than what President Trump said yesterday, was what he left out of his speech. Before Trump, every president has made it a point to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, which says an attack on one is an attack on all.

“It was a bit ironic because he was making a speech in front of what they call the Article 5 memorial wall,” Pifer noted. The memorial was unveiled during Trump’s visit and features a piece of the Berlin Wall and a twisted steel beam taken from the wreckage of the North Tower hit on 9/11 attacks.

“It was a bit ironic because Article 5 has been invoked only one time in NATO’s history and that was in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. It was invoked in defense of the United States.”

That omission sends a signal that is “problematic,” Pifer continued, namely that there are some members the U.S. will defend and others it won’t.

After Trump’s speech, press secretary Sean Spicer said that despite leaving it out of his speech, Trump is “fully committed” to NATO’s collective defense doctrine. “We’re not playing cutesy with this.”

According to former NATO ambassador Douglas Lute, saying the words may seem trivial to Trump’s domestic audience, but it matters a lot to Europeans.

“It may seem rather academic to Americans,” Lute said in an interview with NPR, “but to Europeans and in particular to small European countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union or used to be part of the Warsaw Pact … this is not rhetorical. This is not academic. This is existential.”

On the campaign trail, Trump tapped into that existential fear among some allies when he suggested that the United States would not come the aid of member states who were not sharing the burden.

Asked in a July 2016 interview whether each of the allies could count on the United States to come to their aid militarily if they came under attack, Trump responded, “Have they fulfilled their obligations to us? If they fulfill their obligations to us, the answer is yes.”

Trump’s speech in Brussels “reinforced” that campaign position, said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

“That’s very reminiscent of the ‘America first’ message and it suggests that what we do for NATO is somehow conditional, or a favor we do for them,” he told CNN.

Haass, once rumored to be a top pick for the Trump State Department, warned that by not signalling to NATO allies that the U.S. commitment is iron-clad, “just reinforces doubts about American reliability.”

After the fall of the Soviet Union, every country in the alliance began to rein in its defense spending. While the U.S. and some European countries starting beefing up military expenditures after 9/11, European NATO as a whole continued a slow, steady decline. The onset of the 2008 financial crisis and 2009 Euro crisis meant budget cuts across the board, and defense spending hit an all-time low.

In something of a prophetic speech in 2011, outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warned members of the alliance that if the trend in declining European defense spending was not “halted and reversed” then “future U.S. political leaders … may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.”

Perhaps sooner than Gates expected, that politician arrived in the 2016 election.

“NATO is costing us a fortune,” Trump repeatedly charged from the campaign trail, saying the alliance is “ripping off” U.S. taxpayers who are paying for European security. “The countries we are defending must pay for the cost of this defense, and if not, the U.S. must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves,” he said last April in a foreign policy speech.

As it stands, the United States contributes more than 70 percent of the total dollar amount of defense spending of all the members. Out of the 28 member states only five contribute 2 percent of GDP or more on defense — the United States, Great Britain, Greece, Estonia and Poland. The newest member state, Montenegro, will enter the alliance with a $69 million defense budget.

“The good news is NATO allies are increasing their defense spending,” Pifer noted, adding that in the past year 23 members have begun to increase their defense budgets, a change that amounts to $10 billion in additional NATO resources.

“The trend lines are moving in the right direction, even if we in Washington might wish that those trend lines would climb more quickly,” he said.

While Trump’s election likely prompted some allies to spend more on defense, the real breaking point came in 2014. Russia’s seizure of Crimea and military intervention in Eastern Ukraine was a wake-up call for allies, especially in the east.

At the 2014 summit in Wales, each of the nations who had been cutting defense spending vowed to reverse course and move towards spending 2 percent of GDP on defense by 2024. That summit was the birth of the 2 percent spending goal and marked the first time in history each member agreed to a minimum investment.

It can’t be ignored that the change in trend was a direct response to the Russia threat, something at the forefront of many European leaders’ minds that President Trump did not mention during his public remarks or meetings in Brussels.

“I worry a little bit that if you were in Moscow yesterday, you were probably pretty happy with what the president said,” explained Pifer. “When the president  suggests he is not fully committed to Article 5, what I worry about is the risk [that] the Russians may miscalculate,” believing that the United States is not entirely committed to defend every part of the alliance.

“We want the Russians to believe that if they cross an inch of NATO territory … all the allies will be there to defend that,” he emphasized.

While the concerns about Trump’s commitment to NATO clearly exist among some European leaders, there is always the expression that money talks.

In Trump’s 2018 budget, the United States will invest an additional $1.4 billion in European defense, a 40 percent increase over the last year of the Obama administration.