Americans Are Such Rubes

At USA Today Secretary of State Marco Rubio lauds our NATO allies for their pledge to spend 5% of GDP on security:

Winston Churchill once stated, “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.”

Although the United States has been united by treaty with its NATO allies for nearly 80 years, in the years before Donald Trump becoming president, the United States would have had to fight any major war in Europe effectively alone.

Since the end of the Cold War, Europe’s combined military capabilities had steadily degraded to the point of almost total impotence. Fortunately, President Trump’s decade-long calls for NATO allies to contribute more to shared security have recently been answered with a historic commitment among allies to spend a once-unthinkable 5% of gross domestic product on defense ? a number that reflects both fairness and strategic wisdom.

Not so fast, says Gabriel Elefteriu at Brussels Signal:

Last month’s NATO summit in The Hague gave off the disturbing impression of an alliance finally crossing the fine line between serious defence policy into the realm of make-believe. The main outcome was presented to the world as a “new 5 per cent defence spending pledge” by all allies. The previous target, dating from 2014, was 2 per cent. President Trump naturally claimed the new benchmark as a “big win”, with the White House calling it a “monumental victory” and a “dramatic” increase in defence contributions across the alliance. Yet hardly any of this is true.

Of the 5 per cent, 1.5 is to be counted as any spending intended to “protect critical infrastructure, defend networks, ensure civil preparedness and resilience, innovate, and strengthen the defence industrial base”. In other words, this part of the grand new defence commitment is really an exercise in accounting, as a variety of existing types of rolling domestic investments can simply be designated as “NATO spending”. Italy already plans to declare a €13.5 billion bridge to Sicily as a contribution towards defending Europe – which would be funny if it weren’t a logical outcome of what NATO defence policy has devolved to.

It’s the other 3.5 per cent that is supposed to provide the real (so-called “core”) defence uplift, though. But even this – leaving aside the separate 1.5 per cent nonsense just mentioned – is merely a target to be achieved by 2035, ten full years from now. Given that Russia is supposed to invade us much sooner than that – according to the usual hysterical European warnings – a 2035 target becomes superfluous as it is clearly disconnected from all official strategic calculations. Not to mention that the previous target from 2014 remains unmet 10 years on, with several NATO members not spending even 2 per cent on defence – among them, major countries like Italy (1.49 per cent), Spain (1.28) or Canada (1.37) – and most of the others hovering just above the threshold by intense cooking of the accounting books.

He goes on to document two reasons these countries won’t live up to these pledges. The first is that they lack the fiscal headroom to do it:

Of course, more money for defence could be raised, in principle – in the UK just as in any other European country – either by cutting spending on welfare, by increasing taxes, or by somehow growing the economy. The well-known problem is that neither Britain nor most of its European peers can afford any of these, let alone hope in some miraculous economic growth. They are too weighed down by regulation, taxes, Green costs, expensive energy, deindustrialisation, an aging population and a migrant onslaught to be able to splurge on rearmament at scale.

The second that they lack the political will to do it:

The third main issue standing in the way of getting even to the 3 per cent is that the the domestic situation across many European countries, especially the deeply sclerotic and mismanaged West European ones is becoming more, not less, socially and economically explosive as time goes by. This means more instability going forward, and therefore more need to divert resources and attention to domestic issues as opposed to worrying about Ukraine. Indeed, it is likely that in the coming years – if it takes that long – more politicians might come to see substantial benefits in extricating their country from the Ukraine imbroglio, as a way to save money, tap into new voting pools, and even obtain better energy prices for their debilitated industries.

He concludes:

For all these reasons, and more, it is almost clear that not only the “5 per cent” NATO target is a chimera, but also the 3.5 by 2035 and even the 3 per cent by 2030 (or later). Whether we believe our own fantasies is neither here nor there, except for the fact that it undermines the credibility of the defence capacity we do have. The problem is that the adversary likely doesn’t share in our beliefs – because, whether it is the Russians or the Chinese, they look at facts and realities as they are and make their strategic moves accordingly.

We, on the other hand, choose to live in a world of our own artificial making, increasingly disconnected from the realities and the real balance of power. What we have now is a make-believe European defence policy, in which the US pretends it still guarantees our security and we pretend to pay for it. Let’s hope we won’t be tested anytime soon.

That last witticism is from a Soviet-era wisecrack: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”.

Will the Europeans reform their economies, reduce their spending on welfare, and increase their spending on defense? I’ll believe it when I see it. Here’s France’s military spending as a percent of GDP from MacroTrends: