Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and I believe this is the case with the current US president. He is a broken clock – but he does have a point regarding Europe.
Donald Trump is wrong about most things. In fact, he is wrong about so many things that listing them all would take ages. For simplicity (and to save everyone time) it is much easier to say what he is not wrong about, and I believe on European military spending he is right.
Let’s go back in time together. It is 1949 and the West has formed a military alliance called NATO, which aims to provide security to all of its member states. Translated to simple terms: it is a military alliance that protects the West from the Soviet Union. The West, of course, boasts a long list of values to defend: freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and so on. NATO is a military alliance by necessity of the fact that in this world you can only defend yourself by being strong (ideally the strongest), but at heart it is also an organisation that brings together nations that share the same values. Defending these values is part of NATO’s mission (we could talk all day about how well NATO members themselves have succeeded in upholding such values in their own parliaments, but that would take us down the wrong memory lane).
It is now ~1989 (time flies when you’re having fun, please follow me on social media) and the Soviet Union is essentially collapsing. Russia remains the “natural enemy” of NATO, although its relationship with the West does improve. It is worth noting that although the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia never became a democracy, and neither did it start to embrace any of the western values that NATO stands for. Louder for the people in the back: Russia did NOT become a democracy. So ideologically, the rivalry between NATO and Russia was never over.
However, largely thanks to Putin-sympathizer and former German chancellor (1998-2005) Gerhard Schröder, Europe creates a strategically dangerous dependency from what is still very much an ‘ideological enemy’ – by importing Russian gas. Why this isn’t something that comes up regularly in the discussion around European geopolitics is beyond me: with the approval of the gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, Schröder effectively triggered a domino effect which I believe culminated with the war in Ukraine. The year of the approval of Nord Stream 1 pipeline (2005) may seem far away, but Berlin’s wall had fallen just 16 years prior. In the great scheme of things, 16 years really isn’t a long time and many political figures in German politics still had very strong personal relationships with Russia. Schröder was certainly one of them. By the way, he signed the approval of the gas pipeline 10 days before leaving office (he was replaced by Merkel), and he later worked for several Russian state-owned companies, including Nord Stream itself (…..nothing to see here).
Buying Russian gas worked very well for Germany for a while. Germany is, by the way, not the only country to have bought Russian gas (another big country being Italy), but Schröder was certainly the most influential figure in pushing for the pipeline. Cheap gas allowed Germany to retain its energy-intensive industries like car manufacturing, and to some extent it enabled Germany’s “economic miracle” of the Merkel era. This strategically problematic dependency however did, of course, raise quite a few eyebrows in the US.
The Obama administration brought up the issue of buying gas from a strategic enemy to Germany (and the EU more broadly) to no success: Europe was too eager to keep buying cheap energy, and with Merkel having to shut down nuclear power stations (to replace them with coal, LOL, take that global warming!!) giving up Russian gas simply wasn’t an option. Well, it WAS an option, just not one Europe was willing to choose. The memory of war in Europe felt more and more like a distant nightmare, and it was even believed that by dealing with Russia more closely, Russia could eventually warm up to the idea of democracy. A war in Europe was in nobody’s mind.
But there’s more. Buying gas from Russia was a bad idea because of course it made Russia richer and it made Europe vulnerable should Russia decide to turn off its gas taps. But as if that wasn’t enough, European countries weren’t even meeting their defence spending target. A NATO guideline from 2006 and a later commitment formalised in 2014 (following Russia’s annexation of Crimea), required (“required”) NATO member states to spend 2% of their GDP on defence. I say “required”, because a military alliance shouldn’t “require” anyone to commit to defence spending: spending on defence is in everyone’s interest. It is in a nation’s interest to be able to defend itself, and it is in the nation’s interest that its allies are spending on defence instead of becoming defenceless (or worse, building an energy dependency on the enemy by buying its gas).
It is the failure to meet this defence spending, in the light of all the history I explained above, that makes Trump so painfully right about Europe. Europe (not every country, of course) failed to spend enough to avoid becoming a prey. It is Europe’s defencelessness that has made things so easy for Putin. Who is going to stop him when he takes a piece of Ukraine? Surely not a defenceless continent that depends on him to keep the lights on.
Europe has become defenceless, and it hasn’t happened overnight. Europe was made defenceless by the incompetence and short-sightedness of its inept political class. Ursula von der Leyen now claims to believe in a strong Europe that stands up for itself and spends on defence – but guess who was Germany’s minister of defence between 2013 and 2019? It was her.
Strategic flaws and failure to adhere to the committed defence spending were brought up by multiple US administrations, not just Trump’s. A military alliance is only as strong as its members, and when these stop spending on defending themselves, or worse, pay the enemy and become dependent upon them, the alliance is not working. An alliance is a lot like an insurance policy: everyone pays for it, but people are also expected to adhere to certain behaviours that minimise risk. If you pay for home insurance against fire, chances are the insurance won’t pay if the fire-eater you hired to host your child’s birthday party accidentally burns down the house. The insurance company isn’t “abandoning you” when it refuses to pay. And in the same way the USA is not “abandoning Europe”; indeed, it is quite the opposite – Europe has abandoned the US with its continued failure to invest in defending itself.