Another Look at President Trump’s NATO Policy
By Brenna Sullivan
In his article NATO Doesn’t Need More Defense Spending, featured in The Atlantic, Peter Beinart analyzes responses to Trump’s condemnation of other NATO members’ lack of defense spending. Appalled that many NATO countries, particularly those in Europe, don’t even spend two-percent of their GDP on defense, Trump demanded that they spend four-percent, nearly derailing the annual NATO summit. While Trump’s demands were disturbing to Beinart, what was most concerning to him was the response of liberal journalists and some politicians of the Democratic Party. With the Democratic senators calling for the countries to spend the two-percent GDP so long as Trump makes statements of support of their alliance and news sources such as The New York Times and the Washington Post seeing validity in Trump’s point about two-percent defense spending, Beinart fears that liberals are detaching their supposed values from their stances on foreign policy.
Beinart sees the two-percent figure as irrelevant as there is no specifications about what sectors of defense that money goes to. This figure was originally pushed by the Obama Administration in 2014 when, after annexing Crimea and invading Ukraine, it was thought that Russia may try to invade NATO countries such as Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. However, it is highly unlikely that Russian leader Vladimir Putin would have ever consider this, as it would have resulted in war with the U.S. and their NATO allies, who spend as much as 13 times more than Russia on their military budget.
With this, Beinart doesn’t see Europe’s greatest threat as a military but rather that of rising authoritarianism of its leaders, caused primarily by an influx of mass migration. Many European countries don’t know how to handle the influx of migrants at their borders and jump immediately to hyper-nationalism and defense of one’s own identity as a country. However, the issue of migration can’t and won’t be solved with militarization of Western borders but rather should be mediated with allocation of funds to foreign aid and diplomacy at these locations.
We, especially those of us who hold liberal values, shouldn’t be asking countries to spend more of their money on defense when we ourselves wish for our country to be a greater welfare state that offers better access to healthcare, education, and other resources that our citizens need. We should be encouraging the U.S. to set an example of a country that prioritizes the needs of its people. We should be decreasing our own defense spending and distributing that money to social programs that empower citizens. We should be asking our leader to stop using our exorbitant defense budget as a means of fear-mongering the international community into submission to his childish will. Diplomacy requires conversation and negotiation not demands and threats. Until Trump realizes this, we will continue to make enemies of ourselves as we stray further and further from the possibility of peace.
