On the subject of U.S. complaints about NATO spending- indeed, the U.S. has of course been a disproportionately large contributor to NATO. However their complaints ring somewhat hollow when you also look at who wants and is getting what from this defence spending. Forgive me for getting kinda economical here.
A simplistic view of NATO just looks at each country’s defense spending and treats it all like a public good that contributes interchangeably to the collective defence. Hugely flawed premise.
The defence needs of the allies are different. The allies who border Russia/Belarus: pretty clear their defence needs are very simple and straightforward. They will bear the brunt of any conventional Russian attack. They benefit the most fully from NATO deterrence. Disproportionately the benefit, though also they arguably contribute most ‘fully’ to NATO in the sense that a Polish or Latvian or Finnish defence dollar (or I guess Euro) is pretty entirely and directly benefiting NATO.
Pull back from that border and it gets less clear. You look at what I’ll call ‘non-Colonial’ Euro zone partners, those whose security interests are less directly territorial- they benefit from a collective safety of the Euro zone and the economic boon that comes from that, but there’s less fear of Russian tanks in Paris, Madrid, or Rome. Still, their threat, though less direct, is still Russia. Their military spending by and large defends their interests in some way shape or form against Russia. Most cents on the dollar are still within scope for NATO.
It gets murky when you get to countries with a real presence outside of Europe and the North Atlantic. Britain and even moreso France have interests and military deployments overseas independent of anything covered by NATO mutual defence. So each Pound or Euro is less fully contributing to NATO collective defence and NATO’s other chosen ventures. Though- if the balloon goes up, presumably most if not all of their military capacity would redirect to that threat.
Then you get the U.S., which while being NATO’s most powerful and wealthiest member, is also heavily motivated by its own global hegemony. The U.S. has interest in the security of Europe for the economic stability; it has interest in the Arctic both for its sphere of influence and of course to cover against missiles and bombers coming over the top. But then the U.S. also has a lot of forces in the Middle East, some, clearly, focused on central and South America, and a very substantial posture in the Indo-Pacific. China and Iran are not likely to pose threats that fall under the NATO treaty. And again, yes, the U.S. can repurpose, at any point in time, much of their forces to a war in Europe… But it still means much of their spending isn’t for NATO purposes.
Canada’s unique as a non-European, non-hegemonic NATO member. Our physical security in a NATO context is mostly a simple matter of us bordering the U.S. and being physically between them and Russia. We’ve got a pretty good moat. We do of course benefit from U.S. strategic deterrence, although we probably would be at no realistic risk of nuclear attack but for our alliance with them. Still, it’s reasonable contribute to the ‘over the pole’ defence, and the defence of the moat. But Canada also has pacific security interests outside of NATO, and we play ball with coalition expeditionary ops outside of NATO collective defence. So our defence dollars are certainly ‘impure’ from a NATO standpoint… Though from a U.S. point of view, it could also be be argued that a Canadian defence dollar does a lot more to contribute to defence of the U.S. than that Germans, Spanish, Italian, or Dutch Euro.
So, all that long ramble to say- defence expenditures as a percent of GDP have become a convenient shortcut to try to weigh NATO contributions, but it’s very limited in its use. It focuses on cash inputs and not capability outputs; it treats every Dollar, Pound, or Euro as if it were fully and interchangeably contributing just to NATO collective defence and not a nation’s non-NATO military interests. It struggles to properly value geographic access, whether to physical forces or radar/SIGINT/ELINT. And it also tends to treat it as if each country’s security interests and what they ‘get out of’ NATO are equivalent. While the U.S. is unquestionably the top NATO contributor, they get overweighted by lumping in an entire military notwithstanding that much less than the entirety is in support of NATO. And, to be clear, I strongly believe Canada needs to step it up considerably. I’m not trying to make apologetics here.
None of this makes for good TV news spots or non-nerd articles of course. I think we’ll continue to see a very simplistic focus just on %GDP rather than more meaningful assessment of capability outputs and the ability to project them.
