Last week the outgoing Secretary of Defense made headlines by chiding many North Atlantic Treaty Organization members for their comparatively paltry contributions to their own defense, let alone to the alliance itself.
Outgoing U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates told an audience in Europe that the U.S. was paying approximately 75 percent of NATO’s budget. In 2010, we spent about 4.8 percent of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defense-related expenditures.
The NATO standard is for alliance members to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense. Quite a few NATO member nations do not even reach that goal. For example, Germany, the alliance’s most populous nation after the US, spent 1.3 percent of its GDP on defense in 2010 (and that was down from 1.5 percent in 2005).
What Secretary Gates was communicating was that many NATO members need to spend more for the common defense if they want to keep the alliance going. NATO members cannot expect the US taxpayer to continue to foot the bill for an alliance that many believe has outlived its usefulness.
NATO began in 1949 as an alliance of 12 nations in response to aggressive moves by the Soviet Union to take over as much of Europe as it could after World War II. This was the time of the Berlin Blockade and the take-over of many Eastern European governments by Communist parties directed by Stalin’s Moscow. It was also the time when nations such as Greece, Italy, and France came pretty close to becoming Communist-run as well.
NATO was created to consolidate the defense of Western Europe. It served to bind the democratic nations on both sides of the North Atlantic to each other.
The alliance helped bring about the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Over the next twenty years, NATO expanded its membership from 16 to 28 nations. During this period, NATO’s Partnership for Peace and other initiatives served to bind the new members to the old.
Once 9/11 happened, NATO invoked its Article 5 for the first time, which bound member states to respond to attacks against a fellow member as if it had been attack against them. That is why we have troops from many NATO-member nations serving in Afghanistan.
Virginia is actually the home to one of NATO’s commands – Allied Command Transformation is based in Norfolk. In our area, Fort Belvoir has the closest relationship to NATO. In the cyber world, elements of 1st IO Command are working with Poland to safeguard our networks against hackers. We can only hope that our relationships with our fellow NATO members withstand whatever new security structures evolve from the current alliance.
To turn our backs on our North Atlantic partners is not the answer. We just need them to shoulder more of the burden.
