Is the Old NATO Dead? – The National Interest Online

When President Donald Trump travels to Poland this week to meet with its embattled president Andrzej Duda, the two will have a lot to talk about. Both are alternately ridiculed and pilloried in the international press and both are intensely disliked at European Union headquarters in Brussels. Both have been labeled nationalists, demagogues and even dictators-in-the-making. And both of them question NATOs capacity to act as an effective defensive force.

Since taking office in 2015, Duda has consistently pushed for a stronger NATO presence in Poland. He used his first major English-language interview as president to push for Poland to replace Germany as the real eastern flank of the alliance, and his government has put real money on the table toward that end. Poland is one of only five NATO members to meet its 2 percent of GDP military spending commitment.

By comparison, Germany spends 1.19 percent of its GDP on defense, sixteenth among the twenty-nine NATO members. Poland also meets the less well-known NATO target that at least 20 percent of defense spending should be on equipment, with 25.8 percent of its budget going to procurement. Germany, by contrast, spends only 13.7 percent of its defense budget on equipment, with the result that some German units are armed with broomsticks instead of guns.

What a change a century makes. Until its virtual dismantling in the 1990s, the German Bundeswehr was NATOs main fighting force. While France cowered safely behind a line of American bases in the United Kingdom, West Germany and Italy, the Bundeswehr contributed the majority of NATOs frontline troops, tanks and airplanes. In the darkest days of the Cold War, West Germany was the bulwark of European defense. No longer. With Germany now lacking the capacity to mount any serious military operationand no other European country ready to step into the breachNATO's vaunted Article 5 commitment to collective defense has become, in effect, a unilateral U.S. security guarantee. Trump has now publicly accepted the mantle of that responsibility. But that doesnt change the fact that all for one and one for all only makes sense if all have the capacity to help the one.

It is becoming clearer by the day that most Europeans now understand Article 5 as a one-way American commitment to their security. It is true that NATO stood by the United States on September 11, with some NATO countries (the UK in particular) making serious commitments and suffering serious casualties in Afghanistan. But the military budgets of Americas NATO allies declined precipitously between 200815. Only a few are now able to defend themselves, never mind come to the aid of others.

In Europe, Poland is now NATOs central front, and the Polish government is aching for a more permanent NATO (read: American) presence in the country. The simple fact is that Poland is now the bulwark of Europe. It needs American help to hold the line. And given its deep involvement in Ukrainian affairs, Poland is likely to be ever more useful to the United States as an outpost at the heart of Eastern Europe.

Neither Trump nor Duda is likely to be impressed by European Commission president Jean-Claude Junckers call for a European defense capability to match those of the United States, China and Russia. Speaking in English at a European security conference in Prague, Juncker proposed what has been called a defense spending spree of 90 million euros over three years. Thats equivalent to just $100 million, or about the cost of a single F-35 fighter. Over three years.

Ironically, European leaders bristled last month in Brussels when Trump publicly and privately berated them for not spending enough on defense. Now, despite their overwhelmingly negative response to Trumps demands, they are calling for more European spending on defense. But calling for and doing are two different things. European leaders specialize in calling for. America is better known for doing.

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Is the Old NATO Dead? - The National Interest Online