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Comment by johnzim | Hacker News Reader

This argument would be more persuasive if more countries actually met their recommended NATO spend. In reality it doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Take for instance Germany. The federal republic increased their spend to $63.8b last year but that's still a shortfall of ~$27b relative to what a 2% spend would be.

Aggressive estimates (above official estimates) of the UK's (a similar sized ally) spending on Afghanistan in 2011m put the total figure at $26b for 10 years.

The cumulative shortfall in NATO contributions for Germany over that period is more than 10 times greater than the entire invasion and continued operations in Afghanistan during that period.

(edit: grammar and dollar signs)

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And that argument would be more persuasive if so much NATO spend wasn't funnelled back to the US in both direct and indirect ways.

The UK has Trident and was supposed to be buying F-35s. A number of UK military and civilian aerospace projects were either cancelled (various examples) or crippled commercially (Concorde) because of US interference.

The Afghanistan and Iraq misadventures are still causing significant political costs across Europe. Meanwhile the US has failed to protect the EU against some obvious and immediate threats, including political interference. (Although to be fair it hasn't even protected itself - which is a different problem.)

In any case - the US really isn't a credible victim of exploitation in any of this.

The "recommended NATO spend" is just another way the US is costing its allies money. Sure, in 2019 Germany only spent $50bn (1.3% of GDP). But if the hypothetical enemy is Russia with a military budget of $65bn, then what's the point of spending $80bn? Especially if you are in a treaty that ensures you don't have to defend yourself alone.

The U.S. has no interest in NATO beyond keeping Europe free. Don't think for a second Russia wouldn't pull a Crimea in the Baltics or Poland if NATO were dissolved. And then what, the European Parliament will suddenly get its act together and figure out how to counteract a superpower? Any attempt to do so will last precisely as long as it takes Russia to shut down energy supplies to Germany.

That’s a bit of a stretch... shutting down energy supplies to Central/Western Europe would cost Russia more than it would Germany considering that energy exports are 70% of their total exports and generate over 50% of budget revenue.

Besides there are no good reasons for Russia to occupy the baltic states (or atleast the cost would considerably outweigh anything they might gain from it). Subsidizing Crimea is already very expensive and controlling the baltics (no even speaking about Poland) would cost considerably more (both due to lost income and because they’d have to dedicate considerable resources policing the local populations which (unlike Crimea) don’t want them to be there)

It may be a stretch that Russia has no good reason to occupy the Baltic states, but maybe not. The reason to occupy Eastern Ukraine was that a lot of Russians live there. Guess where else a lot of Russian live.

Even if you don't take the threat seriously it is obvious that other neutral states do: https://www.reuters.com/article/sweden-nato-idUSKBN28J1UL

I think you are probably right. But this is the kind of thing where being wrong is potentially catastrophic. And the world can change faster than you can adjust your defense posture.

By "keeping Europe free" you must mean maintaining the primacy of the United States and her allies in the planetary trade federation?

Note that I did not mention germany, rather the US and canada, while the OP said "all of our allies". No two countries are ever the same. And NATO /= USA. There are lots of other organizations which would quality a country as an "ally" of the US other than NATO. Canada and the UK are linked to the US through numerous other organizations (eg NORAD).

Canada's defence spend last year was $22.2b

As they only met 1.31% of their 2% spend (which would be $37.5b) the shortfall is ~$15.3b annually.

Still sounds like a bargain.

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