President Donald Trump is only the latest U.S. leader to criticize countries within the NATO alliance for not declining investment in defense capabilities.
Trump has lambasted the alliance since taking office for “taking advantage” of the U.S. security umbrella and the failure of the vast majority of alliance countries to hit an agreed-upon 2-percent spending target. The president has been accused of abandoning the transatlantic security alliance despite using much the same rhetoric as former U.S. presidents and policymakers.
Bush first pushed the alliance to increase its defense commitments as early as 2006. The U.S. push at the 2006 summit led to a public commitment by NATO countries to strive for a 2-percent GDP spending target on defense.
Bush took the case up again during his last address to NATO in 2008, saying, “America believes if Europeans invest in their own defense, they will also be stronger and more capable when we deploy together,” adding “I will encourage our European partners to increase their defense investments to support both NATO and EU operations.”
Obama and his team echoed many of the same concerns of the Bush administration. Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates lambasted the alliance in 2011 with a prescient warning, saying:
The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress – and in the American body politic writ large – to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense. Nations apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets.
Gates continued, “Indeed, if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, future U.S. political leaders — those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me – may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.”
Obama went so far as to call the alliance “complacent” in April 2016, saying, “I’ll be honest, sometimes Europe has been complacent about its own defense.”
The former president also said of NATO that “free riders aggravate me,” and that he personally chided former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron to “pay their fair share.”
“What has been a habit over the last several decades in these circumstances is people pushing us to act but then showing an unwillingness to put any skin in the game,” Obama said of allies, including NATO countries.
