A Difference of Opinion

Based on the conversation coming out following the recent NATO conference, there is a substantial difference of opinion over the level of threat that Russia poses to NATO. President Biden as recently as in his press conference last night proclaimed confidently that, were Russia not stopped in Ukraine, it would go on to Poland and, possibly, others. The counter-argument is articulated at Responsible Statecraft by George Beebe:

Does Russia in fact harbor intentions of military conquest against NATO member states? Given the caution Putin has exercised so far in the Ukraine war in avoiding direct attacks on NATO members, the answer is probably no.

And there is a very understandable reason for this caution. As my colleagues Anatol Lieven and Mark Episkopos and I point out in a new Quincy Institute brief, one does not have to delve very deeply into the conventional military balance between Russia and NATO to realize that the Russian military would be badly outmatched in any war with NATO and would have good reason to believe that an attack on any individual NATO member would quickly turn into a conflict with the alliance as a whole.

As the Quincy brief explains, “NATO has a greater than three-to-one advantage over Russia in active-duty ground forces. … The alliance has a ten-to-one lead in military aircraft and a large qualitative edge as well, raising the possibility of total air superiority. At sea, NATO would likely have the capacity to impose a naval blockade on Russian shipping, whose costs would dwarf current economic sanctions. While Russia has clear superiority over individual NATO states, especially in the Baltics, it is extremely unlikely it could exercise this advantage without triggering a broader war with the entire NATO alliance.”

The actual behavior of our NATO allies casts more light on the subject. From Statista military spending for 2024 is:

Lithuania, the former Soviet Baltic country with the largest GDP, is spending just over 2% of GDP on defense. Taking its cue from Germany and France rather than Poland, it is spending just enough to discourage complaints about free-riding. The most recent admissions to the pact, Sweden and Finland are doing the same while substantial economies like those of Canada, Italy, and Spain are spending under 2%. The U. S. is spending more as a percentage of its much greater GDP than any country except Poland or Estonia.

At Geopolitical Monitor Bilal Bilici argues that NATO has been a bargain for the United States:

There are no unpaid dues, bills, or invoices among NATO members, no one owes any debt to any other member. There is the commitment of 2% of GDP to be spent on defense, which was agreed at the 2014 NATO Summit in Wales, and actually, we have seen the strongest growth of defense spending among members in the past several years. This year it is expected that twenty-two out of the thirty-two total member countries will meet or exceed the 2 percent target, including France and Germany.

However, if we must look at NATO from a transactional basis, then we should consider return on investment. Far from being a burden on the US taxpayer as argued by the isolationists, the United States has benefitted enormously from the alliance.

Firstly, in terms of raw defense spending, the United States has not expended budget on behalf of other nations. In fact, without NATO, US defense spending would in fact have to be much higher. Thanks to NATO, the United States is better prepared to defend itself and is able to apply its resources more effectively. The common funding mechanisms and joint military exercises on NATO ensure that member nations share the costs of defense, which helps mitigate the financial strain on a single nation. Additionally, the standardization of equipment and interoperability among NATO forces means that the U.S. can operate seamlessly with its allies, enhancing overall military readiness.

Secondly, the US benefits from the position of leadership in the global economy. By leading NATO, the United States maintains significant influence over global security policies and initiatives. This leadership role allows the U.S. to shape the strategic direction of the alliance, ensuring that its interests and values are represented on the global stage. In particular, we are seeing the emergence of coordinated defense industrial strategies among NATO allies, including the European Defense Industrial Strategy (EDIS), which aims to lay out a framework not only to dramatically increase manufacture of munitions, but to compete globally in technology, innovation, agriculture, and energy.

Lastly, there is the simple face value of deterrence from attack. A mutual defense treaty with such a large, geopolitically important bloc greatly improves US national security at a much lower cost than going at it alone.

There’s something missing from Mr. Bilici’s piece: numbers. I have no idea how you can determine return on investment without calculating either costs or benefits. I can’t argue that NATO has not been a tremendous bargain for a number of our NATO allies, particularly Germany and, notably, since Mr. Bilici is a Turkish politician, Turkey. I think it has provided some benefits to the U. S. There are also two words missing from Mr. Bilici’s piece: readiness and preparedness. Given the notable unreadiness of most of our NATO allies’ militaries what would they need to spend to have the level of preparedness actually required? And how can you calculate ROI without taking that into account?

I also can’t help but agree that if you estimate the benefits as boundless regardless of cost NATO would be a good deal. However, I honestly don’t see how the United States can provide the sort of defense our NATO allies would require in the absence of considerably increased expenditures by those allies so their militaries have higher levels of readiness without re-establishing bases in many of them which would require not only expanding our military and what we’re spending on it but increasing our industrial output to supply them.

The need for more spending by those allies if the core of Robert Peters’s post from the National Security Journal, hosted by Heritage:

The United States has been saying for almost 20 years that Europe needs to do more. In 2011, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warned European leaders that “if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, future U.S. political leaders—those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me—may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.” A decade and a half later, less than two-thirds of NATO members have reached that mark.

This represents a deep unseriousness on the part of many Europeans when it comes to security issues. Europe can either accept to live with a Russia that is able to outgun and therefore threaten Europe, or it can choose to re-arm and deter further Russian aggression within Europe. As noted earlier, many nations in Europe are already moving to higher defense budgets, but more must be done—and urgently.

The good news is that Europe has the resources to easily deter Russia. It has the required manpower, the wealth, the technology, and the industry.

It simply has to make the choice to do so.

The open question is why should they? If the benefits of defending our NATO allies is as great as Mr. Bilici implies, wouldn’t we keep right on doing it regardless of what they spend? That certainly seems to be the conclusion at which they have arrived.