NATO’s “Brain Death” in The Hague

It’s generally unwise to initiate a fight you are unlikely to win. That is a principle that military officers generally try to adhere to. As for NATO’s political leaders, apparently not. NATO has just kick-started a massive guns vs. butter fight in Europe. Not only is this fight largely unnecessary, but it’s one NATO could struggle to win and leave both Europe and the alliance weaker.

This week’s NATO summit in The Hague was intended to demonstrate the urgency and heightened awareness of the threat posed by Russia. Instead, it has just shown that the alliance is clinging to an outdated model. The major outcome of this summit is that European allies and Canada, interestingly not the United States, will commit to spending 3.5 percent of GDP on their militaries and an additional 1.5 percent on defense-related areas to meet President Donald Trump’s demand that NATO allies spend 5 percent of GDP on defense. But instead of focusing the summit on the critical need for Europe to figure out how to fight with significantly less U.S. support, NATO is back to focusing on largely symbolic spending targets.

There is no doubt that Europe should spend more, especially to make up for decades of under-investment and to cope with a less-committed United States. Yet there is also a clear consensus that the way Europeans spend on defense is utterly wasteful and ineffective. European defense spending is spread across roughly 30 different national defense-industrial complexes. European militaries operate a vast array of different equipment, which makes the idea of Europeans deploying forces and fighting together difficult to fathom in practice. The current reality is that European militaries are therefore way less than the sum of their parts.

That has not mattered much for the last 76 years because there was little doubt about who would actually fight the war to defend Europe: the United States. However, Europe can no longer take the U.S. commitment for granted. Politically, it is unclear whether President Trump would order U.S. forces to fight Russia to defend European territory. Practically, the Pentagon is conducting a major force posture review, which is likely to result in significant cuts to U.S. forces in Europe, with a focus on transferring capabilities to the Indo-Pacific. The burden of defending Europe may abruptly shift to Europe.

Rather than marking a meaningful strategic shift, this NATO summit largely amounted to Europe bending the knee to the U.S. president. Nearly every European ally has now signed on to a defense spending target that few actually plan to meet—hoping it will appease Trump and help keep the “Americans in” Europe. Europeans are thus furious at Spain for having the temerity to not commit to something that few of them intend to meet. But by committing to such a high spending target, Europeans may have just helped the Trump administration justify to Congress the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Europe.

Europe is not oblivious to this possibility, and while many hold out hope that U.S. forces stay in Europe, it is broadly understood that if the U.S. leaves, Europe will need to spend more. But the alliance is pretending that the only thing that needs to change is how much Europeans spend. In other words, it is a dangerous illusion for European countries to remain fixated on inputs (defense spending) rather than addressing the more structural issue of translating spending into outputs (improved combat effectiveness).

Therefore, the first problem with the spending target is that it distracts from the harder and more urgent task of reforming and integrating European defense efforts. Europeans are simply unable to fight without the United States. Fixing this will require deep structural changes. Yet Europe’s ministries of defense and protected national defense industries are terrified of reform and the efficiencies that integrating defense efforts could bring. Committing to a new spending target alleviates the pressure for any reform and is thus cheered by ministries of defense. But the only reason for Europeans to spend 3.5 percent to deter Russia—which would be more than the United States’ defense budget and roughly USD 1 trillion—is because Europeans are hesitant to compromise their national competencies for the sake of a shared European problem.

The second issue is that the target is so high that it will trigger a guns vs. butter fight across Europe. Raising the European defense spending commitment to 5 percent of GDP may be politically unviable under current conditions. The United Kingdom just completed a comprehensive defense review, where it struggled to increase defense spending to 2.5 percent. If London were to spend 3.5 percent on defense, it would likely require cuts to its National Health Service, which is a nonstarter politically. France also has extremely high debt levels and a fractured domestic political scene. To hit the target, France would likely also have to cut social services. In most European countries, a politician who cuts health care for defense is faced with a huge political liability in their next election. This would create a political opportunity for large populist parties on the far-right and far-left to argue they are for “peace” and engagement with Russia in order to preserve national social services. Moreover, this dynamic could jeopardize continued support for Ukraine, which is now wholly reliant on European military and economic aid.

Third, Europe just gave the United States a stick to bludgeon it with, as it will inevitably fail to hit the new target. European states have now formally committed to spending more on defense than the United States, exceeding the 3.4 percent of GDP spent by the United States in 2023. This means that every NATO meeting for the next decade could easily be consumed with finger-wagging lectures and U.S. scolding about whether Europe is fulfilling its spending commitments fast enough. By validating the fixation on input targets, it is also possible that a U.S. administration could make additional demands on European spending, such as dedicating a share of the 5 percent to U.S. equipment.

This leads to a fourth problem, namely that disparate compliance with the new spending target across Europe could fracture the alliance. This was hardly a source of tension after allies committed to spending 2 percent of GDP at the 2014 Wales NATO Summit, when the U.S. commitment to Europe’s defense was still considered ironclad. But as a number of countries in Northern and Eastern Europe have already hit the new spending target or come close, they will angrily and righteously point out that they are spending to defend Europe, while others free ride. As the threat of Russian aggression becomes more acute, these countries will decry the lack of solidarity. They will have a point, which will contribute to divisions within Europe.

So what should European countries do?

It is commonly asserted that European countries lack a shared threat perception. The intensity of the threat perception is no doubt lower the further a European capital is from Russia. But support for Ukraine has remained robust across Europe. Russia is seen everywhere as a major threat to Europe. The problem is that the vehicle (national military spending) through which non-Eastern flank Europe and politicians are being asked to contribute to Europe’s defense feels very indirect and wasteful. It’s immensely difficult to communicate to voters how a marginal increase in Portuguese defense spending will make a concrete difference in defending Estonia. Justifying massive increases in defense spending and cuts to social services out of “solidarity” is unlikely to be persuasive enough.

Instead of asking NATO allies to spend out of “solidarity,” European countries should jointly commit to being responsible for tangible tasks that contribute to a stronger, more autonomous European defense. For instance, southern countries could carry the borrowing costs for EU-issued joint debt for defense (so-called Eurobonds). By one calculation, the European Union could borrow EUR 500 billion, resulting in an annual interest burden of about EUR 15 billion per year. That cost could be carried by countries on NATO’s southern flank and would give Europe a common pot of funding to undertake large-scale procurement decisions that address major capability gaps. Additionally, what countries like Italy and Spain lack in fiscal space, they can make up for in scale. They have real manpower, approximately 160,000 and 120,000 active soldiers in uniform, for Italy and Spain, respectively, which many Eastern European countries lack. European countries could focus on leveraging this strength to defend the eastern flank, perhaps by permanently deploying a portion of these forces. Furthermore, European countries could demand that countries that are unwilling to ramp up defense spending should play a larger role in supporting Ukraine, given the urgent need. What is needed are tangible proposals instead of abstract spending targets.

Lastly, European political leaders need to put forward dramatic reform efforts that overhaul and integrate European defense efforts. European countries are quite clear that they want defense to be a collective European responsibility, not just left to individual member states. A Eurobarometer survey shows that overwhelming support for a centralized EU defense effort is over 80 percent. Sentiment analysis of European public opinion finds that the “Policy packages meeting the most support require higher levels of ambition, joint EU-level governance, joint purchases of military equipment through joint procurement, and progressive taxation increases as the preferred form of financing.” European countries correctly realize the threat is less to their individual nations than to Europe. Yet NATO and Europe’s leaders have just offered more of the same and failed to give Europe what it wants: a common effort to defend Europe.

Instead of beginning to reckon with the reality that there will be fewer U.S. forces in NATO, that U.S. forces are drawing down, and that the United States is less politically committed to European security, NATO and European leaders have decided to pretend that nothing has changed. President Trump was not “flying into another big success in The Hague,” as NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte enthusiastically texted the U.S. president. Rather, NATO risks validating Emmanuel Macron’s earlier warning that the alliance could become “brain dead” if it fails to get serious in confronting its new strategic reality.

Max Bergmann is director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program and Stuart Center in Euro-Atlantic and Northern European Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.