NATO members failing to meet US spending demands

By Bahattin Gonultas, Dilara Zengin and Fatih Erkan Dogan

ANKARA (AA) - Since taking office, U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration have repeated his campaign demands for America’s NATO allies to increase defense spending.

The U.S. has called for each of the alliance’s 28 members to devote 2 percent of GDP to defense and has accused those countries that do not reach these levels of riding Washington’s coattails.

The situation was highlighted at last weekend when Trump tweeted that Germany “owes vast sums of money to NATO” and said the U.S. “must be paid more for… the defense it provides to Germany!”

The U.S. spent more than $664 billion on defense last year, or 3.61 percent of its GDP, according to NATO figures. The total defense spending of all NATO members amounted to $921.44 billion.

Last year, only four other NATO members -- Greece, Poland, Estonia and the U.K. -- met the 2 percent target, which was set in 2014.

Turkey, which has NATO’s second largest military after the U.S., spent $12.1 billion in 2016, accounting for 1.69 percent of GDP.

Cahit Armagan Dilek, director of the 21st Century Turkey Institute, said Trump’s remarks may be attributed to his business background but pointed out that Washington has voiced disquiet about the defense spending of its NATO partners in the past.

“In 2010-2011, the former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates also criticized NATO’s European members for reducing their defense expenditures and said the U.S. was not obliged to meet this deficit,” Dilek told Anadolu Agency.

- US foreign goals

“The defense expenditure of some European countries was so low at the time that it came out that some German military units… failed to meet the operational readiness criteria in 2012-2014.”

U.S. spending on NATO is largely determined by its use of the alliance to pursue its foreign policy goals, Dilek, a former Turkish naval officer, said.

“That’s why the U.S. provided a very substantial amount of NATO’s expenditure from the beginning,” he said. “NATO is the U.S.’s most important instrument… to wield against countries such as Russia and China, those who may arise as a global opponent, and also the most important tool for the U.S. to influence developments in Europe.

“In this regard, the U.S. and President Trump are likely to keep pushing EU countries to fulfill their share of expenditure.”

He added that the renewed threat from Russia in eastern Europe strengthened the U.S. argument, as recent NATO deployments to the Baltic region have shown.

“Similar situation is true for Turkey,” Dilek said, referring to Russia’s military presence across the Black Sea in Crimea as well as in support of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Although ties have largely been repaired, in November 2015 tensions between Ankara and Moscow were heightened by the downing of a Russian warplane over the Turkish-Syrian border by the Turkish Air Force.

In addition to the individual military budgets of member states, NATO also has its own military and civil spending plans valued at around $1.75 billion.