I’m glad that Marc Fisher brought this subject up in his Washington Post column:
What is new and different about Trump’s decision to use NATO and Germany as punching bags on his European trip is the president’s failure to understand that NATO and the European Union were designed both to build a counterweight to the Soviet Union and to save Germany from itself. The Americans and the other Europeans wanted to enmesh Germany so thoroughly in Western alliances that it never again became a dominant, destabilizing force. As NATO’s first secretary general, Lord Ismay, put it in the 1950s, the alliance’s purpose was “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.â€
When I was The Washington Post’s bureau chief in Germany in the 1990s, I often met with the late Walther Kiep, a businessman and politician who had lived through both the Nazi era and Germany’s 1968 student revolts. Kiep would argue that the United States had left Germans in an impossible bind — we didn’t want them to show any hint of militarism or nationalism for fear of resurgent extremism, yet we wanted them to pay their share and take on some of the risk of defending the West.
The Germans, in turn, had a similarly unfair attitude toward the United States, he said. They took their post-World War II pacifism so seriously that they were largely unwilling to defend themselves: “The Americans have come to be considered by many Germans as a sort of night watchman whom we expect, for a nominal fee, to protect us. But we caution him not to make much noise and not to use weapons.â€
During President Trump’s visit to Europe this week considerable attention has been paid in the media to the second leg of Lord Ismay’s tripod, a little to the first (substituting Russians for the Soviet Union), and none at all to the third.
As the late Mayor Daley used to say, let’s look at the record.
- Germany presently dominates the economy of the European continent.
- Germany calls the shots at the European Central Bank.
- Germany has imposed onerous requirements on debtor nations, e.g. Greece.
- Materials sold by German companies were instrumental to the success of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program.
- Germany reunified in 1990.
- Germany encouraged Croatian independence from Yugoslavia and was the first country to recognize Croatia, sending substantial aid to the new country in its civil war against Yugoslavia.
- Materials sold by German companies were instrumental in Iran’s nuclear and missile development programs.
- Germany was a major source of foreign exchange for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
- Germany’s multiple overtures to Russia go back to the 1960s.
Not one of these actions promotes a U. S. interest. Germany is not our friend and it isn’t being kept down. If it’s reasonable to question the U. S.’s commitment to NATO, isn’t it reasonable to question Germany’s?
It’s even worse than that. Hitler survived and is now POTUS.
Germany is the main threat to the rest of Europe, as always. However, its extensive demilitarization and its delusional energy policies constrain it and keep it manageable. Both policies should be encouraged, especially Germany’s dependence on Russian oil, gas and (now) coal.
The idea that Russia can be substituted for the Soviet Union is so absurd that one has to assume the speaker is deliberately lying. When the Soviet Union fell, Russia, itself, lost half its own population and economy and one-third of its own territory. Add to that, that Russia no longer had access to the former Warsaw Pact allies or their populations and economies. All of those resources were transferred to NATO and the EU.
Today, the relevant EU:Russian ratios are: population, 3.6:1; GDP, 4.6:1, active duty servicemen, 1.8:1. Add in the US and Turkey and the ratios double. I shouldn’t have to keep repeating these facts.
Additionally, the Soviet Union was apocalyptic and millennialist while Russia is just irredentist.
The grave weakness of Europe is, as I have been saying, in force readiness. The only militaries in the world today at the highest level of readiness are ours, Russia’s, France’s, and, possibly, China’s, India’s and the United Kingdom’s.
Heh.
“It is refreshing to hear an American president call the Europeans out for the sybarites and deadbeats they are, rather than repeat the old cant about the glories of the Atlantic Alliance and the gallantry of America’s allies.â€
The fundamental problem with the 2% demand is that Germany and the rest of NATO are (mostly) democracies. Merkel cannot actually commit to a 2% spending target because she is not a dictator. While heads of state need to play nice with other heads of state, legislatures don’t. The promises of NATO’s elites don’t amount to a hill of beams. The legislatures of Europe are unlikely to submit to Trump’s demands and my refuse just to spite him.
Talk, as they say, is cheap. The way to get Europe to have more skin in the game won’t be achieved through the various means of public and private nagging we’ve engaged in over the past couple of decades. It will be achieved by forcing the Europeans to actually have more skin in the game. And that means reducing our forward military commitment to Europe and telling them that we will have their back after the 3-6 months it will take us to mobilize and respond. If a few NATO countries want to another adventure in Libya or Balkans, then we can do what we’ve done with the Saudi’s – give them some aerial refueling, intel support and maybe a few other low-cost enabling capabilities and then wish them good luck.
As I’ve said repeatedly, the 2% is just a number. It’s the readiness that’s the issue.
And that’s the fundamental problem. It isn’t that they’re democracies. It’s that the original NATO members, e.g. Germany, Belgium, Canada, Italy, etc. have shorted their militaries for so long that the level of spending that would be required to bring them to an acceptable level of readiness would require substantial sacrifice at this point. The 2% might provide a down payment but the sad reality is that they probably can never make up for decades of neglect with that level of spending and even spending 2% could cause governments to fall. It’s all just too little too late.
I have always disagreed with the Snow White approach to the alliance but it’s tremendously prevalent here. There are many influential Americans who want weak allies. I think that no allies at all would be better than weak ones. A military alliance is instrumental.
“There are many influential Americans who want weak allies. “
And European countries playing co-dependent wife, who put up with transgressions because they can go shopping at Saks. And isn’t that really how, over the years, we’ve arrived here? It’s simply no longer sustainable.
” The promises of NATO’s elites don’t amount to a hill of beams. ”
If they ever do announce they are going to spend 2% I would look closely at the details. I bet you see road maintenance and normal policing lumped into that. This 2% thing is all posturing. It lets Trump look tough for his base, and doesn’t alienate the neocons who want to keep NATO.
Steve
As I’ve written before, I don’t think we should exit NATO, I just think we should treat it more as Germany does. Participate in the various events, make grand speeches about our historic connection, and reduce the forces we actually station in Europe to the bare minimum. Andy’s outline above is a pretty fair approximation.