Trump’s meaningless NATO spending debate

As in a bad marriage, the arguments of U.S. President Donald Trump and his European partners have descended into a sort of ritual exchange. So at this week’s NATO summit, we can be confident that Trump will complain about the lack of European defense spending and threaten to leave Europe if the NATO allies don’t stump up. The Europeans will accept the premise of his argument, point to what they have recently achieved, and pledge to do more.

Rinse and repeat

The whole affair has the structure of an Apprentice episode. We don’t know what crazy s**t Trump will say during the show, but we know how it will end.

Such burden-sharing debates are traditional at NATO meetings. The main difference now is that Trump has an advantage in pushing Europeans to spend more relative to past U.S. presidents. Because he doesn’t care about the trans-Atlantic alliance, he can more credibly threaten to withdraw the U.S. security blanket from Europe. And because Europeans still rely on U.S. security guarantees for their defense, they feel that they simply can’t risk it and so do their best to satisfy his demands.

It is a reasonable response. European and American experts alike, including Trump’s staunchest foes, admit that the president has a point and that Europeans should spend more on defense. They often note that every U.S. administration since the 1950s has a made a similar demand of the Europeans. And so the hope is that if Trump’s gonzo tactics get the allies to finally open their coffers, the alliance will be better off for the effort.

Money for nothing

Alas, those who would advise Europeans to accede to Trump’s demands are not really paying attention to what Trump says he wants and how he operates. Sure, there are good reasons for Europeans to spend more on defense (though even here the issue is really spending more wisely rather than spending more). But regardless, there is no satisfying Trump’s demands about European spending.

The European response to Trump’s histrionics over spending is nearly irrelevant to how his administration will treat the alliance. In fact, we have already seen a fair degree of effort to respond to Trump’s critique. European defense spending is creeping up—27 of 28 members of NATO are now increasing their defense spending, eight will meet the 2 percent target this year, and 16 countries are on track to meet it by the agreed date of 2024.

Trump could simply declare victory, claim that he has achieved what all past presidents (particularly Barack Obama) had failed to do, and go home, leaving NATO to go about its boring daily routine defending of Europe and supporting America’s wars abroad. But he probably won’t.

It seems clear at this point that Trump does not want to solve the burden-sharing problem. On the contrary, he wants to use Europeans’ collective sense of guilt over their lack of spending, as well as the European fear of American abandonment, to gain concessions on what really matters to him: reducing the American trade deficit. Indeed, at the summit, he may explicitly link a continued American security guarantee with economic concessions from Europe.

Trump’s focus on trade means that Europe cannot conceivably meet his demands on defense spending. If the Europeans parked a brand-new aircraft carrier off the coast of Mar-a-Lago and tossed the keys onto the 18th green, Trump would simply charge them greens fees. In the end, he doesn’t believe in the idea that America should defend Europe, so why should the United States pay anything at all? He is only interested in it if it brings in a profit.

So every time Europeans respond to his repeated blandishments on defense spending with new pledges to pay more, he seems to grow ever more sure that he is on to something and doubles down on his critique. One feels confident at this point that such critiques will persist at least as long as the U.S. trade deficit with Europe.

Appeasing a bully

Appeasement of Trump’s bullying is not the right strategy. Of course, Europeans need to get their house in order in defense. But that effort has little to do with symbolic defense spending targets and even less to do with the impossible task of satisfying Trump. Rather, they should focus on creating a truly independent defense capability. That effort probably does involve more spending, but more importantly it means creating a European military capability that can stand on its own. Such a capability will allow the Europeans to negotiate with Trump, and future American presidents, from a position of equality.

To persist in the long term, the trans-Atlantic alliance needs equality in negotiation much more than it needs equality in spending. The NATO alliance does not depend on equal burdens, which it has never had; it depends on solidarity. And solidarity only comes when both sides are getting what they need and feel they are being treated fairly. Effective bullying can perhaps create some wasteful defense spending, but it cannot create a new trans-Atlantic bargain that will preserve that essential solidarity.