gracchusdixit

Ever obedient to the demands of his Russian handler and former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump has been waging a steady war of attrition against the greatest and most important of our military and political alliances, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.  NATO was originally constituted in the aftermath of the Second World War to insulate both Western Europe and the United States against the enormous threat then posed by the Soviet Union, a communist behemoth armed with nuclear weapons, occupying vast swaths of Eastern Europe, and intent on exporting its political system throughout the globe.  In this, NATO proved to be fabulously successful.   The ambitions of the Soviet Union were largely contained, until it collapsed in 1989 and the Russian Federation took its place.

Donald Trump would now like us to believe that NATO is obsolete and, even worse, some kind of geopolitical and financial fraud, in which the United States is being bilked by slippery European slackers.  Several months ago, he made the following claim, which he has repeated incessantly ever since:

We pay so much disproportionately more for NATO.  We are getting ripped off by every other country in NATO, where they pay virtually nothing, most of them.  And we’re paying a majority of the costs.

This, like so many of Trump’s assertions, is a shameless falsehood.  Nonetheless, he is unfortunately making progress in convincing a large chunk of the American public otherwise.  In recent polling, nearly half of Americans agreed with the proposition that the United States should decline to defend its NATO allies unless or until they “pay their fair share”.  What these people do not realize is that our NATO allies already pay their “fair share,” and then some.

Americans themselves are partly to blame for the success of Trump’s deception.  A quarter of our fellow citizens think that the sun revolves around the earth, and more than 70 percent believe in angels.  Why should we expect such people to understand the ins and outs of NATO funding or, for that matter, any other question that requires more than a modicum of rudimentary knowledge? It is the job of political leaders, particularly the President of the United States, to explain and clarify such questions and to do so honestly.  Our current president prefers to obfuscate, mislead, and lie.

Let’s consider the lies, one at a time:

To begin with, the United States does not pay “disproportionately more” for NATO.  Quite to the contrary, we pay considerably less than we reasonably should.  We pay 22 percent of NATO’s annual budget, despite the fact that the size of our economy is as large as all the other NATO countries put together. 

Trump’s claim that other NATO countries “pay virtually nothing” is worse than wrong; it is a deliberate deceit.  Every NATO country, even the smallest, contributes to the budget of the alliance, and each does so according to a formula, which the United States engineered to its own advantage.  For example, the three leading members of NATO, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, pay 35 percent of alliance’s budget against our 22 percent.  If their contributions were truly “proportionate,” they would be paying about 10 percent of the bill, since the combined size of their economies is less than half the size of ours.  If anybody is being “ripped off,” it isn’t the United States, it is the Germans, the French, and the the Brits.

The most outrageous falsehood in Trump’s claim is that we pay a “majority” of NATO’s costs.  This is arrant nonsense.  Our military presence in Europe costs roughly $30 billion, a mere five percent of our total military budget.  The other NATO nations spend more than $200 billion on their combined military budgets.

No less outrageous is Trump’s insinuation that we bear the brunt of Europe’s defense and get nothing in return.

The United States deploys roughly 50,000 troops in Europe, which amounts to fewer than four percent of our 1.3 million military personnel, the vast majority of whom are stationed right here in the good, old US-of-A.  Why our country, bordered by two vast oceans and two utterly non-threatening neighbors, needs such a military establishment is a question in its own right.  Be that as it may, the American military presence in Europe is a drop in the bucket when compared with the combined military forces of the other NATO nations, who number 1.9 million.

What’s more, most of the 50,000 troops we deploy in Europe are located in Germany and Italy, where we have army, navy and air bases, which are designed, not to the protect the countries in which they are situated, but our own strategic interests.  Our air bases in Ramstein, Germany, and Aviano, Italy, for example, played major roles in the 1991 Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq, neither of which had anything to do with defending Europe, let alone Germany or Italy.  Our massive naval base in the Bay of Naples is home to the 6th Fleet, which isn’t there to protect Italy but to give the United States effective naval and air control of the Mediterranean.  Despite all this, Germany and Italy pay a not insignificant part of the costs of maintaining these and the numerous other American military installations in their countries.

The only remotely substantive fact underpinning Trump’s complaints is the question of the total military spending of our NATO allies.  In 2014—under the Obama administration—those allies agreed to a goal of increasing their military spending to the equivalent of two percent of their national GDPs.  Since then, several have reached that goal and nearly all have moved closer.  This apparently isn’t enough for Donald Trump, who is now demanding that the goal-post be raised to four percent and reached immediately. 

The original, entirely voluntary goal of two percent was arbitrary and nonsensical enough.  A goal of four percent, which exceeds the level of our own military spending, is utterly absurd.  It might be one thing for Poland and the Baltic states to spend that much on defense, since Russia sits on their borders and has invaded and occupied them in the past; it would be quite another for a country like Spain, which shares its one and only border with France and is 4,000 miles away from the nearest Russian troops.

In the end, Trump’s bullying mendacity has nothing to do with logic, fairness, or military necessity.  His entire purpose, and Vladimir Putin’s, is to undermine the alliance that has kept Russian ambitions in check for nearly 70 years.  Far from being a “rip-off,” NATO is one of the greatest bargains in history.  As a guarantor of American interests and national security, it is, and always has been, worth every penny.