Is America Getting a Bargain With NATO?

The Atlantic
Updated

A reader of ours, Ira Straus, has been pushing an unpopular idea about NATO for decades now, but his idea may have never been more unpopular than right now. After all, as an American pro-NATO advocate and the founder of the Committee for Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO (CEERN) who was a Fulbright Scholar and taught in Russia, Straus is so convinced of the benefits of NATO that he thinks the alliance or something in its image should expand infinitely, to include all of Eastern Europe, Russia, and eventually the whole world. Yet the Republican Party’s nominee for President of the United States, who could take office in six short months, recently caused what passes for an uproar in the navel-gazing community of foreign policy commentators by mentioning that he might not honor the alliance’s obligations.

When Trump’s comment blew up, we at The Atlantic examined the issue from several sides: Jeffrey Goldberg looked at how identical to Putin’s outlook the Trump foreign policy platform had become; Uri Friedman spoke to a former general about what would happen if Russia invaded and a Commander-in-Chief Trump followed through on his suggestion of doing nothing; I interviewed Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign policy luminary and NATO expert, about the history of the alliance and its function; and Jeffrey Tayler wrote in an article and a a follow-up note that Trump’s position contains more than a kernel of wisdom: NATO is outdated, outmoded, and counterproductive, and many of the worst foreign policy outcomes of the past several years could have been avoided if it hadn’t been for the aggressive posture of the American-led alliance and its policy of expansion.

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Now Straus has written in via hello@theatlantic.com to challenge what he says are a set of misconceptions about the costs and benefits of NATO, arguing, in effect, that the Trump take has things precisely backwards—the alliance is, on Straus’s view, a strategic and financial bargain. While taking a best-case view about what Trump’s intentions may have been in making anti-NATO comments, Straus bears that out below, in his “Four points on why NATO is the Greater America and saves us money”:

1. It is pure myth that NATO is costing America money.

a. The U.S. actually pays a meager 22% of NATO’s (very small) budget—far less than America’s proportionate share. The allies are paying disproportionately much for NATO. So NATO gets us a net gain in the form of their spending; but again, it is a small budget.

b. The European allies provide and pay for more than 90% of the allied troops that are in Europe and defending Europe, while the U.S., less than 10%. In earlier years we had put up a slightly more respectable fraction of the troops defending Europe, but Europe always put up more than 80% of them. None of these troops are NATO-hired forces; they are all national forces, so NATO isn’t costing either America or Europe any money for these forces. They are our own expenditures, by our own choice. What NATO does, however, is to make sure these forces are never directed against us, and to give us some actual use of all these European forces. It does this by putting them under our joint training and coordination and planning. Thanks to this, they lack plans or practical capabilities for acting against us, and they are instead fairly well prepared to be commanded by our U.S. Commander—who is also the NATO SACEUR—whenever we’re attacked or whenever it’s agreed to take a joint action. In this respect, NATO gets us some big things for free.

Some people might prefer to have a real empire instead of NATO (even while they incongruously attack NATO as an “empire”), and to be able to call up European troops at will and tax Europeans as much as we want. I won’t argue with the goal that someday in the future we should have an Atlantic union where we have a joint army and joint taxation to pay for it with complete burden sharing. I insist on only one thing:

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This article was originally published on The Atlantic.