Abe Newman and I have a piece in Vox on Trump’s attempt to pressure allies into spending more on defense. You should ignore the title. The gist of the argument is that, first, there are upsides to having wealthy and technologically advanced allies dependent on the US for their security needs; second, while it would be great to get NATO allies to spend more on defense, this is a very dangerous way to go about doing it; and, third, the benefits of burden-sharing are likely overblown.
Since it went live, I’ve had a few interesting exchanges. One of the claims that we make is that Trump’s calls for burden-sharing are a bit odd. If we want to derive economic benefits from burden-sharing, we need to reallocate defense savings into more productive sectors. Trump’s own plans for military spending suggest he has no intention of doing this. But Raymond Pritchett points out that the alliance has major recapitalization needs—including the SSBN-leg of the nuclear triad—and so some in the Pentagon might hope that burden-sharing allows reallocation.
Regardless, please give it a read.
Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.
He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.
He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.
Originally this comment was much longer and I shortened it (how’s that for self-restraint?).
—
Read down until I got to this sentence:
Think about it: The United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan
are not engaged in great-power rivalries with one another, or with the
United States. Instead, they are all part of an American-centric
security architecture, in which the United States has muted their
desire, and ability, to become military peer-competitors.
Afaict, France and Germany have zero desire to be military competitors and great-power rivals (irrespective of the U.S. role); that’s why they were the core driving force behind the orgs in the early 50s that eventually became the Common Market and the EC and then the EU. What prevents France and Germany from engaging in great-power rivalry is mainly the experience of the two world wars and the determination not to repeat it. The US-centric security architecture might not have hurt in this respect, but esp by now it’s very much a secondary if not tertiary causal factor. The notion that 40,000 U.S. soldiers permanently stationed in Germany — 70 plus years after the end of WW2 — is what’s preventing France and Germany from engaging in an arms race on the continent stretches credulity. India spends a huge amount of money on sophisticated armaments partly b.c it has a somewhat reasonable, albeit no doubt exaggerated, fear of China, and partly b.c of its longstanding, albeit rather pointless and counterproductive, rivalry w Pakistan. The France-Germany relation is nothing like that, nor is Britain-France, etc.
This all has not much to do with fairness, free-riding, or burden-sharing. The basic questions imo are whether an architecture so heavily revolving around one country (i.e. the U.S.) as anchor, umbrella, and guarantor is a reasonable, sensible way to structure the 21st-century global security order, and whether the world would be worse off if multiple countries anchored the system rather than one (I think it wouldn’t be worse off and a good case could be made that it would be better off).
You ignore the part where we argue that Trump’s approach to burden-sharing risks decoupling.