Opinion: NATO has bigger problems than Donald Trump

Then, in his singular obsession with the apparent Kurdish threat, Turkey invaded a neighbouring country, in brazen violation of international law and the rules-based order NATO claims to defend. Mr. Erdogan’s actions in northern Syria are so corrosive to the alliance that Germany is now warming up to the idea of just the sort of internationally controlled security safe zone along the Turkish border that Mr. Erdogan has long advocated. However, Mr.

But all along Mr. Macron has had a problem: The French cannot implement a safe zone on their own. Mr. Macron needs the European Union to legitimize it and military contributions from European countries to realize it. In effect, he is using the safe zone in his quest to make the European Union an autarkic military actor. His plan amounts to having the Germans pay for the European Union and its member states to support France’s military bidding. Mr.

To this end, Mr. Macron is capitalizing on political weakness in Germany, Britain, and Italy. The jig has worked repeatedly. He got his way on his preferred candidates for the presidency of the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund. He knows that German Chancellor Angela Merkel is greatly constrained in her ability to rein him in for fear of emboldening the electoral chances of the Front National.

To get his way on European defence, Mr. Macron seeks to undermine NATO as a viable alternative. His comment about NATO being “brain dead”. Yet, Macron’s criticism of Mr. Trump is duplicitous. NATO has several budget lines. One is known as common funding. It pays for NATO’s principal budgets: the civil budget , the military budget and the NATO Security Investment Programme .

All 29 member states contribute according to an agreed cost-share formula, based on Gross National Income. As a result, the U.S. curries the greatest financial burden. The Trump administration has been leveraging Common Funding to push the case for greater burden-sharing, insisting that the U.S. not pay more than the second-largest contributor: Germany. That’s par for the course: NATO’s first burden-sharing crisis dates back to then-U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles, in December, 1953.

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