The Future Is Not Bright for NATO and the Security of Europe

The United States will no longer bear the financial burden of NATO on behalf of Europeans, especially as many of the countries on the Old Continent are reluctant to join the front line. This is one of the harshest warnings to come from American officials as US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates delivered this message unequivocally on Friday in Brussels.

The Europeans’ stinginess is jeopardizing the very existence of the Alliance, and Washington is no longer willing to supply the biggest slice of NATO’s financing. Europe will have to chip in or let NATO perish. Gates’ warning came at a carefully chosen moment, when fierce battles are being fought in Congress over the new U.S. budget and while the EU is preparing to launch negotiations for its budget between 2013 and 2020.

For six decades, many European states have relied on America for their defense. Yet the U.S.’ emotional and historical attachment to NATO is “aging out,” as Gates pointed out [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/10/gates-nato-alliance-dim-i_n_874715.html]. For a growing number of Americans, NATO has remained a symbol of a by-gone era when the Soviet threat was still palpable. Since the dissolution of the USSR and the end of the Cold War, the Alliance has nevertheless been expanded to include 12 new members, one of which is Romania, but the Europeans did not significantly increase the NATO budget. The Americans, on the other hand, have had enough of this unbalanced club: the U.S. on one side and the rest of the countries, on an almost irrelevant plane, on the other. Gates added, threateningly, that some “nations [are] apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets” [http://www.europeaninstitute.org/June-2011/us-lambasts-european-allies-for-failing-nato-610.html]. Could he have been more explicit than that?

Germany reacted immediately, explaining that Berlin is making considerable contributions to the budget of the Alliance. Great Britain rallied behind its number one ally and turned against the Europeans. The British Secretary of State for Defense issued his very own accusations: European governments undermine military cooperation with the USA, as well as some long-term operations such as the one in Afghanistan, in which case the Europeans’ appetite for sending troops is consistently declining. The figures seem to indicate the Americans and the British are right: during the last few years, European contributions to the NATO piggy bank have decreased by $45 billion. Overall, however, the 26 European members of NATO have supplied $220 billion (which is a quarter of the total, as the USA contributed $700 billion).

What Gates is practically asking Europe to do now is to change one of its defining traits: its low appetite for militarization. “The general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — [this] has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st,” Robert Gates explained some time ago [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/world/europe/24nato.html?ref=world]. The most obvious example is Libya, where France and a few other NATO members have pushed for an intervention by the Alliance, but where few countries have actually participated in the operations. Although all NATO states have voted for the intervention, only half are, in fact, participating. A few days before, it was again Robert Gates who criticized Germany’s decision to remain distanced from the intervention in Libya, as well as the decision of other allies to withdraw. The test of Libya, where the U.S. wanted to play a supporting role only, has not yet ended, but, as each day goes by, it seems more and more likely that it will be a failure. The U.S. is determined to put into practice what it has been preaching and go from threats to concrete measures. An American infantry brigade stationed in Europe is already scheduled to return to the U.S. as part of the reduction of American troops on the Old Continent. The signal has been sent. It remains to be seen whether Europe will be willing to learn to defend itself and whether the European leaders will be willing to allocate larger sums of money to rockets, at the expense of social protection, during a time of crisis.