Literary Corner: NATO as Protection Racket

 

NATO map by CBS News.

Until I Came Along

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

NATO was busted until I came along.

You don't pay your bills, you get no protection.
It's very simple. I said,
‘Everybody’s gonna pay.’ They said, ‘Well,
if we don’t pay, are you still
going to protect us?’
I said, ‘Absolutely not.’

They couldn’t believe the answer.
One of the presidents of a big country
stood up and said, 'Well, sir,
if we don't pay and we're attacked
by Russia, will you protect us?'
'No, I would not protect you.
In fact, I would encourage them
to do whatever the hell they want.
You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.'

NATO actually does have bills, for its political headquarters and command structure in Brussels, which belong not to any specific country but to the organization as a whole, and various programs it runs, for a some €3.3 billion in 2023, or 0.3% of the members' total defense spending, and these are paid for with member contributions, on a sliding scale according to the wealth of the particular country: the two biggest being the US and Germany, at just over 16% each, with Britain and France coming next at 11% and 10% respectively, and so on, down to Montenegro, paying a bit under 0.03% of the budget.

It's not a whole lot of money, in reality, and NATO has never been busted, as Trump puts it. It's also not what Trump is talking about. But Trump does not know that. 

Trump has it confused with a different thing: the amount of money each member spends on its own armed forces, which is regarded as indirect funding of NATO operations, keeping the forces in a state of readiness and deploying them when the time comes (as in the ongoing Steadfast Defender exercise, the largest since the end of the Cold War). That's far bigger money than what it takes to keep them in business in Brussels.

In 2006 the alliance's defense ministers agreed that each country ought to be spending a minimum of 2% of its GDP (US spends 3.5%) on its military (except for Iceland, which doesn't have one), and it didn't happen, partly because of the world financial crisis in 2008, and in 2014, that's the Obama administration, all the countries joined a Defense Investment Pledge in which they formally promised to do it, and those countries spending less than 2% adopted NATO Capability Target plans to get them there in a 10-year period, which brings us to now, when a majority of them haven't yet made it, as you see, though nearly all of them are closer, and some very close.

Chart by Reuters.

These are the figures for what Trump calls the "bills" the members are supposed to pay, expressed as a percentage of GDP, for 2021 (light gray), 2022 (dark gray), and 2023 (yellow). What he doesn't get is that they're not paying it to anybody: they're spending it on themselves, buying weapons and matériel and paying soldiers and administrators and so on. That's why it's called a "defense" budget; they're not paying somebody, as Trump supposes, to protect them, they're taking a share of the responsibility for protecting themselves, as well as prepared to come to one another's aid if called upon under Article V (which has been invoked only once in the alliance's history, as you'll remember, on behalf of the US in September 2001).

The thing that jumps out for me that I haven't seen anybody else noticing in the charts, and this multi-year chart in particular, is which countries are across the 2% threshold: other than the US and UK (which has actually cut defense spending over the last three years) and Greece, they are all the ones bordering on Russia (Finland, Estonia, Latvia) and/or Belarus (Lithuania, Poland), Ukraine (Slovakia, Hungary), and Moldova (Romania);  the countries Russia could invade directly, or through a neighbor it has already reintegrated into the Empire, or is trying mightily to conquer right now, or the poor little country it is likeliest to invade next if it succeeds in conquering Ukraine. And also mostly countries over which the Russian Empire exerted some kind of violent dominance at some point in its long history, as Vladimir Putin could tell you about at some length.

And their meeting the targets had nothing to do with when Trump "came along"; they were largely responding to Putin's moves on Ukraine, originally the territorial seizures of 2014, and then the all-out war of February 2022 (which also inspired Finland and Sweden to break with decades of policy and join NATO in the first place). 

So the countries that actually might get invaded by Russia are the ones working hardest to protect themselves, as you might expect, and Trump would have no excuse for turning them down, if he became president again. Not that that would necessarily make any difference: I imagine what he'd be doing is just what it sounds like, gangsterism looking for some kind of personal payoff, as he was with North Korea in 2017 and Ukraine in 2019.

It's pretty clear that his inability to comprehend the NATO contribution issue is what Macron and Trudeau and others were laughing about, in the inaudible bit of the tape that hurt Trump's feelings so much in December 2019, when he learned how his NATO peers really felt about him. (Made explicit in a way it wasn't in the US press, in the somewhat extended Sky News report here.)