No American president since 1941 has failed to acknow-ledge his country’s obligations to those who share its democratic values. In that year, three months before Pearl Harbour, Britain and the United States, under Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, signed the Atlantic Charter.
It effectively established the US guarantee to lead the effort to build a democratic and free post-war world. But just a year earlier, a large majority of Americans in a deeply isolationist US had been prepared to see Hitler extinguish British (and European) democracy and nationhood, rather than get involved in another European conflict. Their slogan – as Donald Trump’s today – was “America First”.
On the electoral campaign stomp, Trump said the US would think twice about coming to the aid of Nato’s members under the Article 5 mutual defence clause (“an attack on one signifies an attack on all”), if they did not meet the target of devoting two per cent of GDP to defence expenditure. He even described Nato as “obsolete”.
Despite this, there are hopeful reports that, in line with every successive American administration which has played a leadership role in Nato, the President-elect’s campaign rhetoric may be giving way to a more pragmatic approach. There are indications that Trump’s America will indeed come to the defence of any Nato countries attacked by Russia and will continue to play the leading role in the alliance.
For Nato, there is now a worrying interregnum between US presidents. Obama is a lame duck for the next few weeks. This leaves a vacuum for Russia to flex its muscles. The great temptation for Putin is to test whether Trump’s isolationist mindset will give Russia more room for manoeuvre in Ukraine. In the Baltics, indeed, he may well be ready to validate Trump’s commitment by making a move against Lithuania, a frontline Nato state with Russia.
Trump is of course right to express anger at the United States’ disproportionate contribution to European security. He is wrong, however, to threaten to make US support for a Nato ally that comes under attack conditional on whether it spends sufficiently on its armed forces.
Such a move would undermine one of the founding principles of Nato, enshrined in Article 5 of the treaty, which would automatically trigger the appropriate military response. To do so would remove the deterrent effect that has ensured peace in Europe since 1949.
The US devotes about 3.6 per cent of its $18 trillion GDP to defence and currently accounts for almost 70 per cent of the defence expenditure of Nato. By contrast, only four Nato countries – Britain, Poland, Greece and Estonia – meet the two per cent of GDP target which the alliance has agreed should be the minimum contribution to defence. Four big European countries – Germany (1.19 per cent), France (1.78 per cent), Italy (1.11 per cent) and Spain (0.91 per cent) – lag well behind, together with 19 other Nato countries.
Some European members of Nato, such as Germany, France and Italy, are still in thrall to the dream after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of Communism that Europe could enjoy a “peace dividend”, freeing up cash to boost welfare spending. By contrast, Russia under Putin has used a major portion of its oil revenues to overhaul its military forces, develop new weapon systems and test them in battle in the Ukraine and Syria.
The absolutely wrong thing to do is for powerful voices within the EU to seek to use Trump’s campaign bombast to push their own misconceived desire for an EU army
To cement the alliance under a Trump administration, it is axiomatic that European countries should aim to meet the spending targets to which they are committed. European Nato allies should be doing all they can to demonstrate to the President-elect that the Alliance is vital not just for the security and stability of Europe, but for the United States as well.
The absolutely wrong thing to do is for powerful voices within the EU to seek to use Trump’s campaign bombast to push their own misconceived desire for an “EU Army”. Such talk alone reduces even further Europe’s commitment to Nato in the eyes of the US, which could make it more likely that Trump would be tempted to walk away from European defence.
The election of Trump should act as the catalyst for all those European states which have relied for decades on the US to bankroll their security. The President-elect is not taking a unique or unusual position by insisting that European Nato members share more fairly the burdens of defending their countries. Every American president since the 1960s has voiced the complaint. Trump’s position expresses a simple important calculation. Every alliance has to be based on an equitable sharing of risks and costs.
European states should be ready to make financial sacrifices to guard themselves from Russia – which is currently led by a military adventurist – and Daesh or other possible external threats. To abdicate this responsibility would be to undermine the credibility of the alliance. What the EU should not do is to frighten its members into a plainly flawed federal project, a notional “European Army”.
Yet that was precisely the first response to the Trump victory from the (unimpressive) president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker. He told an audience in Berlin in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s victory: “We need a new approach to building a European security union with the end goal of establishing a European army,” clearly implying that Europe could no longer rely on the United States under President-elect Trump.
As currently framed, such a plan would be a retrograde step which would endanger the security of Europe. Indeed, the proposal to create new European headquarters in Brussels would muddy the Nato chain of command of European units. Above all, resources that should be spent on strengthening Nato’s European deployments would be likely diverted into a parallel EU bureaucracy.
There can be no comparison between the deterrent effect of a “Euro-army” and a solid Nato alliance. The only real teeth available to Europe in a military crisis are those deployed by European members of Nato.
Creating a European army as a substitute for Nato would be an unworkable dream. France and Germany have led a push for a common European military structure that could “act autonomously from Nato”. But Britain, Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania have rightly expressed concerns over the plans, fearing that they would undermine Nato’s role as Europe’s first line of defence and give Trump a pretext to withdraw.
EU defence cooperation – such as the proposed €5 billion fund for military research and a common armaments development programme – is desirable in and of itself, provided it does not undermine Nato. It is crucial that any EU structures should be complementary with Nato.
It would be foolish to undermine the architecture that has protected European security for 70 years. Europe’s contribution to building up Nato must be focused on outsmarting Russia’s new weaponry and new forms of war-fighting, including countering state-sponsored cyber hacking of the continent’s infrastructure. That demands more cash investment in defence and, above all, greater political will.
While an integrated ‘European Army’ is not the way to go, this emphatically does not mean Europe should not develop more efficient and effective fighting forces. The security of Europe and the health of the trans-Atlantic relationship, which has kept the peace in Europe, depend on it.