Europe Paying for Its Own Defense Is the Whole Point
For thirty years they said it couldn't be done. It was done in eighteen months. The trick was being willing to mean it.
The two-percent-of-GDP defense-spending commitment was made by every NATO member in 2014 in response to the Russian seizure of Crimea. For ten years afterward, almost none of them met it. The American foreign-policy establishment described this as a regrettable but unsolvable structural feature of the alliance, and produced essay after essay explaining why nothing could be done.
Eighteen months into the current administration, almost all of them are meeting it, and several are exceeding it. Germany has rebuilt the largest land army in continental Europe, in the same country that two years ago had ammunition stockpiles for two days of fighting. Poland is now spending over four percent of its GDP on defense, fielding more main battle tanks than the United Kingdom and France combined. The United Kingdom has reversed two decades of defense cuts. Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, the Nordics — all on a sustained ramp.
How the impossible became routine
The mechanism was not persuasion. The Europeans had been told politely for thirty years and had quietly declined. The mechanism was that the previous American posture — an unconditional commitment regardless of allied behavior — was withdrawn, replaced by a credible posture in which the allied behavior was the precondition for the commitment. Faced with the prospect of having to provide for their own defense, the European states discovered they could provide for their own defense.
This is exactly what the foreign-policy establishment, for thirty years, said was impossible. The establishment was wrong. The establishment was wrong for a specific reason: it had spent so long inside the alliance architecture that it had stopped recognizing the architecture as a choice rather than as a fact of nature. When the choice was reversed, the architecture adjusted. The adjustment was painful in the short run and stabilizing in the long run, which is generally true of structural reforms across every domain of policy.
The value to America
The American taxpayer is now subsidizing a smaller share of European security. The American military, which had been thinned by two decades of forward deployments to allies who were not paying their share, has begun a recapitalization that addresses the actual strategic threat — the western Pacific — rather than continuing to run the museum exhibit of mid-Cold-War posture in central Europe. Both of these outcomes were on the policy menu for thirty years and were declined by every prior administration. The current one took them. The country is better for it.
The European allies are also, on examination, better for it. A defense industrial base that exists is a deterrent that exists. A deterrent that exists is one that the adversary has to take seriously. The adversary is taking it seriously, and the European theater is, for the first time in a decade, quieter than it was.