Exhorting Our NATO Allies

Most of Anatol Lieven’s post at The American Conservative is devoted to some clarifications of Russia’s recent provocative air activities but I thought his concluding paragraph was worth taking note of:

Instead of trying to trap the U.S. into a commitment to Ukraine involving the permanent risk of war with Russia—with all the long-term dangers and costs to the U.S. that would follow—European governments should be steadily and sensibly building up the defenses of NATO within its existing borders while at the same time developing a viable peace settlement by which Russia would abandon its impossible demands to Ukraine in return for a new European security architecture guaranteeing Russia’s own legitimate security interests. Of such European thinking, however, there is at present very little sign.

The following graph, courtesy of the World Bank, illustrates Germany’s defense spending over the last 65 years.

In 2024 Germany spent 2% of its GDP on defense for the first time in more than 30 years. The area I’ve shaded illustrates the shortfall in Germany’s spending.

There is such a thing as defense infrastructure. Spending 2% of GDP in one year is not enough. I don’t know that Germany needs to spend 2% every year to make up for more than 30 years of neglect. It might. But it’s surely going to require something.

Now repeat that exercise for all of NATOs members. The sums involved are daunting.

Also, see Wolfgang Munchau’s post at UnHerd:

The Cold War was a period of relative stability not only because of balance-of-power politics, but because politicians who experienced the horrors of the Second World War wanted to secure peace. Most of that generation is no longer with us. Like Weber, today’s European elites have missed out on the opportunity to fight a glorious war. The difference is that they would prefer to let others do the fighting for them.

The likelihood of an escalation into a hot war is big enough to be taken seriously. Apart from a general war-hungry disposition, the biggest risk today is that we, like those Germans in 1914, are misjudging the enemy. Putin, too, misjudged the Western response to his invasion of Ukraine, and the resilience of the Ukrainian army. But the Western misjudgements are more persistent.

The biggest of all was that Russia’s economy was weak and would ultimately buckle under Western pressure. This misjudgement has several layers. It started off with a statistical lie — that Russia was really only a small economy. If you measure the size of the Russian economy by its annual output in US dollars, that would have indeed been the case. At the start of the war, the Russian economy was approximately the size of Spain’s if measured in US dollars. But this is not a good way to judge a country’s capacity in times of war. What matters is the spending power of their money — how many tanks their money can buy. The answer is they can buy a lot more tanks than us.