NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has told Europe it should “keep on dreaming” if it thinks it can defend itself without the support of the United States.
“If anyone thinks here again that the European Union, or Europe as a whole, can defend itself without the US, keep on dreaming. You can’t. We can’t. We need each other,” Rutte said during an address to the European Parliament in Brussels on Monday.
The NATO chief warned European nations they would need to increase defense spending to 10% if they “really want to do it alone,” adding they would need to build up their own nuclear capability, costing billions of euros.
That’s cool but is also a rather useless description of the situation. If you add up the contributions from the top 15 military spenders in NATO (excluding the US) you get about half of what the US spends. The US dominates military spending in Europe no matter how you slice it.
If you want to reduce military reliance on the US, which you unequivocally should do, it will require either significant investments in defense or the acceptance of a significant reduction in military assets and preparedness for the EU as a whole.
Not if you slice it by spending as a percentage of GDP, in which case the US ranks above average among NATO members but does not especially stand out. Of total NATO military spending, about two thirds comes from the US mainly because of its large productive capacity. Most of the NATO members, especially in eastern and southern Europe, are simply not very rich countries. Indeed, those three I mentioned are all rich Nordic countries (the top 10 is rounded out by Israel and Gulf states).
It’s a fiction that European NATO members spend little and rely only on the US for defence. None but the US itself could realistically oppose a coalition of non-US NATO members. This is precisely why increased spending is necessary, to hedge against the uncertainty of an increasingly erratic and authoritarian US.