What would Ike say now?
NATO’s first Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Dwight Eisenhower, felt strongly that his mission was to make European countries “militarily self-reliant,” not for American forces to become a permanent bodyguard for Brussels and Berlin.
“If within ten years all American troops currently stationed in Europe for national defense purposes do not return to the United States, the whole program will have failed,” he wrote about NATO in 1951.
But as leaders of NATO member states gather in Washington on Tuesday to mark the alliance’s 75th anniversary, about 90,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Germany, Italy, Britain and other countries, making up a significant portion of NATO’s 500,000 troops on readiness.
America’s outsized presence doesn’t just come in the form of military forces. Of the $206 billion in military and non-military aid that countries around the world have allocated to Ukraine, $79 billion comes from the United States, according to the Ukraine Aid Tracking Database. Since about 1960, the U.S. share of allied nations’ GDP has averaged about 36 percent, while the U.S. share of allied nations’ military spending has exceeded 61 percent, according to a Cato Institute report. Europe has never been the commander in chief of an alliance.
It is now becoming increasingly clear that European countries need to take more responsibility for their own defense, not only because Donald Trump and the isolationist wing of the Republican Party complain bitterly about having to defend wealthy countries whose welfare payments the US can only dream of because of its low military spending, but also because US officials are increasingly focused on the Chinese threat, which will require increasing attention and resources in the coming years, given the growing cooperation between China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.
America cannot do everything alone, everywhere, all at once. The future requires well-armed and capable allies. Indispensable nations need to become a little less indispensable.
Regardless of who wins the US elections, European leaders understand they need to contribute more, Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Baas Eide told me. During a recent visit to Washington, he said, Republicans told him Europe had to take on more responsibility in the Ukraine war because the US had “more important issues.”
Things are starting to happen, but not as quickly as they should. NATO summits will no doubt celebrate the fact that NATO’s 23 member states are expected to spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense; a decade ago only three met this benchmark. But it’s astonishing that almost a third of NATO’s 32 member states have yet to meet this spending target agreed to in 2014. If Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine and President Trump’s not-so-overt threats to abandon free-riders haven’t convinced countries to pay more for their own defense, it’s hard to imagine what will.
After all, Europe’s reliance on the U.S. military runs counter to what many Europeans and Americans want. A recent poll by the Institute for Global Affairs found that majorities in the U.S., Britain, France and Germany believe Europe “should be primarily responsible for its own defense while seeking to maintain the NATO alliance.” Only 7 percent of German respondents and 13 percent of French think the U.S. should be primarily responsible for Europe’s defense.
Europe’s reliance on the United States has caused growing unrest on the continent, with former Finnish president Sauli Niinistö calling for a “more European NATO” and French President Emmanuel Macron warning that “no matter how strong our alliance with the United States is, we are not a priority for NATO.”
So why does this dependency persist?
Part of the reason is human nature: What reason would allies have to invest in defense if the U.S. always footed the bill? But another reason is structural: When NATO was founded, European allies had just emerged from a devastating war that had left them suspicious of, and even hostile towards, each other. Someone had to herd the cats.
Thus, the US role in NATO changed from temporary benefactor to permanent protector. In the beginning, NATO was like a policeman watching over a construction site. The alliance was closely tied to the Marshall Plan. If the US was going to help rebuild Europe, it had to make sure that Moscow didn’t steal their investments.
But by the 1960s it was clear that American troops wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon. The Soviets had occupied much of Eastern Europe, including East Germany. West Germany was therefore key to stopping the Soviets, but given what had happened under the Nazi regime, few Europeans could accept the idea of a strong German army. So the US stayed behind, protecting Germany with its own troops and nuclear umbrella.
“The current system didn’t come about because America was trying to become some kind of empire,” Mark Trachtenberg, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles who has written extensively about the Cold War, told me. “It came about because, by 1961, US leaders realized that there couldn’t be a purely European solution to Europe’s security problems.” Americans were trapped in Europe, he said.
Once Washington realized it could not back down, it began to take the lead. “We will pay the price for leadership,” McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to President John F. Kennedy, said in 1962. “We will enjoy some of the benefits of leadership.”
That meant attractive defense contracts for American companies, a powerful economic incentive to have a large footprint in Europe. It’s one of the reasons why Poland buys American tanks that are too heavy to cross Polish bridges, and Romania buys fighter jets that are very expensive to operate and maintain. The US military-industrial complex profits from dependency: about 63% of military equipment purchased by European Union countries in 2022-23 was made in the US.
After the end of the Cold War, European nations tried to break away from U.S. military power. In 1998, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac tried to create a European security system that could act independently. But Secretary of State Madeleine Albright forestalled the effort with a speech warning against reducing NATO’s role, duplicating NATO efforts, and discriminating against NATO members that were not part of the European Union.
In 2017, 23 European countries launched the Permanent Structural Cooperation Agreement on Security and Defence to cooperate on practical projects such as cyber defence. This too was met with a negative reaction from the Trump administration, which warned against excluding US companies.
It’s no wonder that Europe today lacks the capacity to field the soldiers and equipment NATO needs to defend its member states, especially when it comes to specialized forces like air defense, intelligence, and surveillance. John R. Deni, author of a new report on NATO readiness, told me that NATO planners always come up short when asked to deliver advanced systems, in part because so many have already been sent to Ukraine. “There’s not enough to go around,” Deni told me. “There are still problematic gaps.”
Fortunately, some European leaders are treating this issue with the urgency it deserves. At the summit, NATO member states are expected to approve a new defense industrial pledge to expand arms and ammunition production. But NATO’s procurement plans are heavily reliant on U.S. arms manufacturers. This clashes with the new European Defense Industrial Strategy published by the European Commission in March, which calls for half of the military procurement budget to come from European-made products by 2030. Here again, we need to herd cats; there is a desperate need for both institutions to get their act together.
If so, it would be a major step forward in Europe’s ability to support its own defense. In the past, Americans might have sensed a threat to their authority and thwarted this effort to develop a European defense industry. But today, as Americans struggle to expand their own defense production, they need all the help they can get.
“A stronger Europe will lead to a stronger NATO and ultimately a more equal partnership between the U.S. and Europe,” said Rachel Rizzo, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s European Center. “We need equals, not clients.”
The European nations are finally moving forward as General Eisenhower dreamed. Let’s not get in their way.
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