U.S. Tells Europe To Handle Its Own Defense
The Trump administration’s foreign policy gambits can be baffling: Why rename the Gulf of Mexico? What is this fixation on annexing Greenland? Does anybody really want to find out what happens if we add Canadians to the U.S. Senate? But the president is right that allies have been allowed to shift the costs of their defense to the United States for decades, and they’ve relied on the U.S. to resolve what are largely European problems. With the U.S. government spending far beyond its means, it’s time for our NATO allies to step up, as U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently suggested.
Blunt Word for Europe
“The United States remains committed to the NATO alliance and to the defense partnership with Europe, full stop,” Hegseth, who served as an infantry officer in Afghanistan and Iraq before taking high-profile roles with Fox News and then with the Trump administration, commented last week at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group held in Brussels. “But the United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency.”
Hegseth went on to say that any security guarantees negotiated for Ukraine after almost three long years of war between that country and invading Russian forces “must be backed by capable European and non-European troops,” but only “as part of a non-NATO mission….To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine.”
But what really brought the message home for attendees was when the U.S. defense secretary emphasized that America has security obligations throughout the world, particularly regarding China. That means, with NATO, the U.S. would focus on “empowering Europe to own responsibility for its own security.” To that end, Hegseth urged U.S. allies to exceed the 2-percent-of-GDP target for defense spending set by the alliance—which most fail to meet—and to aim for 5 percent.
Hegseth’s speech threw “the world’s biggest military alliance into disarray,” according to the A.P. But the message wasn’t unanticipated, nor was the reality of competing demands on American resources entirely unappreciated. France’s President Emmanuel Macron quickly called a meeting of European leaders “to discuss European security.” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte agreed Europe and Canada “have not paid enough over the last 40 years…. The U.S. is rightly asking for a rebalancing of that.”
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