Yesterday, the Telegraph ran this extraordinary story calmly contemplating an honest-to-Jehovah war between the United Kingdom and Spain over Gibraltar.
The idea of NATO allies fighting each other was formerly reserved to Greece and Turkey. Now the bounds of our imaginations are expanding. And as we know, in this political climate, your imagination is your reality.
The story reminded me of last week’s news that US SecState Rex Tillerson — at a meeting of US ministers that, at first, he didn’t want to attend — gave NATO allies two months to come up with a plan to spend 2 percent of GDP on defence.
His throwing-down-of-the-gauntlet occurred not longer after our esteemed President supposedly handed Angela Merkel a ‘bill’ of some 300 billion euros, presumably the cost of the US defence of Europe.
If these actions — still early in this Administration — aren’t intended to push the Alliance to the breaking point, then I’m not sure what would. Tillerson has to know that the allies won’t give him what he wants in 2 months. Surly belligerence is not a foreign policy.
Do the President and his surrogates really mean what they say? Probably not — for Trump, ‘foreign affairs’ often seems indistinguishable from bluffing and bluster. But you can’t underestimate his worst impulses. Cornered by his own threats, he might make good on them.
It occurred to me: You want our NATO allies to spend 2 per cent on defence? Fine. Just disband the alliance, and have them fight each other. Like Spain and the UK over Gibraltar, a minor issue easily resolved through multilateral dialogue within institutions like NATO and the European Union.
But — oops! — the UK’s not in the EU for long, is it?
NATO has never done a good job arguing for itself, particularly when member states rhetorically attack. But the 2 per cent figure has always been a red herring.
We should assess defence spending not in terms of some arbitrary percent-of-GDP, but in how we ensure our security. As an Alliance, NATO’s great value comes from its allies spending less on defence, rather than more, because they can do more by working together. That’s really NATO’s whole point.
After all, there’s no use in spending more on purely military hardware if you don’t feel threatened by hard militaries, and — with the prominent exception of the Baltic states — most NATO allies do not.
For Germany or France, the main issue is internal security — returning foreign fighters, radical extremism, cyberattacks, and the like.
The question for Europe is: would you spend billions on cruise missiles when what you’re really worried about is migration and radicalised youth, just to soften the moods of an unstable US President and his credulous domestic supporters?
For Germany, the answer is clearly no.
So what happens in May, when President Trump comes to NATO and starts distributing bills to allies who quickly drop them in the rubbish bin?
We may see defence spending rise after all, but not for the reasons we intend.
