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Outside In | With defence spending a priority, can Nato members balance their budgets?
- Donald Trump’s threat to encourage Russia to attack alliance members which are failing to ‘pay their bills’ has horrified leaders across the West
- As the need for increased defence spending rises, pressure is being piled on national budgets that are already stretched thin
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Even as a ghost in the corridors of global power, Donald Trump retains an unnerving capacity to make the windows rattle. His attack last weekend on Nato powers which he claimed are failing to “pay their bills” – suggesting he would welcome Russian President Vladimir Putin attacking them – had Europe’s leaders horrified and their defence ministers anxiously scrutinising how to increase their defence budgets.
US President Joe Biden weighed in, saying “it’s dumb, it’s shameful, it’s dangerous, it’s un-American”. European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell called Trump’s blurt a “silly idea”. But the “silly idea” was not that Europeans must raise their military spending. It was that Trump is playing with fire to offer any kind of encouragement to Putin.
There are any number of reasons Trump’s stream-of-consciousness jibberish should be ignored, not least that with any luck he will not be re-elected. But the terrible possibility that he and his acolytes could return to power at the end of the year, with fast-forming plans to reset the nature of US relations with the rest of the world, has allowed Trump’s thoughts to hit a raw nerve.
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Defence spending has now formally joined a long and growing queue of impossible budgetary imperatives facing governments worldwide, and among Nato’s 31 members in particular.
How to reconcile depleted coffers and diminished revenues – following the punishing pandemic years with record levels of debt, rising debt service costs, increasing healthcare, education, social security and pensions costs and the daunting costs linked with mitigating climate change and getting to “net zero” by 2050 – has already pushed many governments into what the Financial Times’ Chris Giles calls “fiscal fantasies”.
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Russia launches missile drills to test its ability to deliver ‘massive’ retaliatory nuclear strike
Russia launches missile drills to test its ability to deliver ‘massive’ retaliatory nuclear strike
Demands for more military spending have many political leaders blinking in the headlights, but they make the imperative for action no less pressing. Even a pacifist like me needs to concede that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s brutal assault on Palestinians have together transformed the defence-funding debate.
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