| America’s ‘2% Defense Spending’ Obsession Is Self-Defeating and Outdated |
 | | Mr. Trump speaks to reporters before departing Washington for Europe. Samuel Corum for The New York Times | |
| There’s exactly one major point of agreement between Mr. Trump and the American foreign policy establishment: the demand that European countries spend more on defense. |
| Mr. Trump raised this repeatedly during his campaign and, at a NATO summit meeting this week, even suggesting that he would withdraw from NATO itself over it. (Though he has also discussed European defense spending as a payment to the United States or as some sort of payment into a collective NATO budget, and it’s neither.) |
| In the end, Mr. Trump backed off his threat by taking credit for pre-planned European defense spending increases. The Europeans had served this up to give Mr. Trump an artificial “win,” though he made sure to humiliate his hosts first by portraying himself as having strong-armed them into it. Still, this issue seems unlikely to go away. |
| Americans have been making a big deal about this for years before Mr. Trump came along. You’ve probably heard it expressed as a single number, raised over and over by American think tanks and pundits and by Mr. Trump himself: 2 percent. |
| That number refers to the goal that all members of NATO will spend the equivalent of 2 percent of their country’s GDP on defense by 2024 (a common misconception is that they’re supposed to hit the target right now, but they’re not). It’s a big number; by some estimates, even China doesn’t spend that much. |
| It’s often raised as an issue of “burden-sharing.” The idea is that Europeans should carry more of the burden of defending their continent. European defense budgets (and whether they meet 2 percent of GDP) is meant as a shorthand for whether European countries are carrying their fair share of wider alliance burdens. |
| But this 2 percent number, we would argue, has become a red herring. It obscures more than it clarifies. Meant to focus the alliance, it’s become a distraction. It risks setting back the very ambitions it is meant to further. And, maybe most urgently for Europe, there’s very little reason to think hitting this goal (or even the highly unrealistic four percent goal he’s reportedly floated) will appease Mr. Trump. |
| It’s worth pausing to ask: What is the point of increasing European defense spending? Defense budgets are not an end in themselves. The underlying assumption is that, if defense budgets increase, European countries will, for instance, demonstrate a greater stake in the alliance. They’ll be better equipped to deter Russian bullying. They can deploy troops in vulnerable spots. And so on. |
| But more defense spending does not in itself achieve those goals, and might not be the best way to do so. |
| In Germany, for instance, we heard exasperated lawmakers explain that increasing military spending comes at political as well as financial cost. It’s unpopular with voters who feel social services are strained. That money and domestic political capital could instead be spent on, say, changes to the German energy economy that would reduce Russian natural gas imports — which could be a lot more effective at achieving alliance goals of containing Russia. |
| And, the German lawmakers would often add, the Americans do not seem to have a clear vision for what such a rapid, major increase in German defense spending would even achieve. It’s not as if Berlin can go buy a new military off the shelf. Such a thing takes decades to develop. Pouring many billions more dollars into defense budgets right away, without a useful way to spend it, seems like it could be wasteful, even counterproductive. |
| It is true that European countries broadly need to do more to uphold the alliance. Not out of abstract questions of fairness, but because European commitments are essential to the alliance’s long-term survival in a rapidly changing world. |
| It’s understandable why American leaders and analysts wanted to reduce this complex and hard-to-quantify question — are Europeans doing enough for the alliance? — down to a single number. But that little number leaves out way more than it includes, distorting incentives in ways that arguably hurt more than they help. |
| For instance, Canadian leaders announced at this week’s NATO summit that they would send 250 troops to Iraq and offer to take over the NATO training mission there. That’s far more meaningful to the alliance than if Canada had dumped, say, a billion dollars into the coast guard budget. But Canada’s new commitments aren’t counted under the defense spending number, whereas spending more on the coast guard would’ve been. |
| But perhaps the greatest point of frustration is the notion that Mr. Trump’s assaults on the European alliance are really about defense spending at all. You hear that notion often from American foreign policy hands, even those who otherwise disagree with the president: Doesn’t Mr. Trump have a point? If his belligerence gets Europeans to spend more, isn’t that good? |
| It’s an odd argument because there is little reason to think that Mr. Trump will soften his hostility to Europe if countries hit 2 percent, and even Mr. Trump does not appear to see this dispute as really about European defense spending. |
| He has made crystal-clear that he doesn’t see the collective defense of Europe as worthwhile in its own right. But this collective defense is the point of European defense spending, so more defense spending cannot appease him because he does not value its results. |
| Rather, Mr. Trump seems to expect some sort of payday — he referred this week to NATO allies as delinquent on money owed to the United States, though no such debt exists. Virtually every time he raises the issue, he cites it as evidence that the United States does not get enough in return for its military spending in Europe, which is not a grievance that can be resolved by Germans building more tanks. |
| No payday is ever going to come. Not if Germany spends 2 percent or 20 percent of its GDP on defense. It’s simply not how this works. So his antagonism is just going to continue. |
| And then there is the glaring contradiction at the core of Mr. Trump’s military spending obsession. He insists both that he will increase American defense spending to its highest post-war levels, mainly on big-ticket hardware that is designed to be used abroad, and also that the United States must “pay less” on defense costs abroad. |
| It’s one of many hints that Mr. Trump’s uses defense spending as a way to express more gut-level impulses — a desire to project strength, a desire to extract concessions from allies — that are not directly related to actual military budgets. |
| Mr. Trump does not even appear to see European defense budgets as primarily a defense issue. Rather, as Alice Fordham writes for NPR, Mr. Trump seems to see defense spending as a trade issue, as if it were a line item on some balance sheet measuring whether the United States is the winner or the loser in each of its foreign relationships. Complaints about European defense spending come as bullet-points within tirades about how the United States is being ripped off. |
| “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,” Jeremy Shapiro, the research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, wrote this week. “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.” |
| Mr. Trump has repeatedly stated that this is really all about trade numbers — which he misunderstands in a separate set of ways, by treating the trade deficit as a zero-sum scorecard rather than simply a measure of which way goods are flowing. Flipping American trade deficits into trade surpluses would be a victory only in his own mind. |
| But we digress. Even if trade deficits mattered in the way that Mr. Trump believes they matter, altering European defense budgets would not alter those deficits. So, for Europeans, what would be the point in trying to appease Mr. Trump by making defense spending increases that won’t actually appease him? The whole episode can only end in frustration for both sides. |
| This has been Mr. Trump’s main challenge on the European defense spending issue since he came into office: an overwhelming desire to change trade numbers by aggressively demanding concessions that will not actually change those numbers. |
| When he finds inevitable disappointment, Europeans wonder, who will he blame? His advisers? His allies? How will he respond? His track record with European allies so far suggests that he sees bluster as an end in itself, so maybe the result will just be more lectures and tweets. |
| That may have been Mr. Trump’s goal all along. Some reports out of the summit suggest that Mr. Trump demanded certain countries hit 2 percent by 2019, which would mean dumping tens of billions of dollars into defense budgets effectively overnight. This is simply not how defense spending works and would accomplish little other than waste and, for any European leader who followed through, an all-but-certainly career-ending backlash among voters at home. |
| “The NATO alliance does not depend on equal burdens, which it has never had; it depends on solidarity,” Mr. Shapiro wrote. “Effective bullying can perhaps create some wasteful defence spending, but it cannot create a new transatlantic bargain that will preserve that essential solidarity.” |
| Whatever the effect of Mr. Trump’s actions on defense spending, it seems likely to exact real costs on that decades-old trans-Atlantic solidarity. |
