Burden Sharing Is Not a Trump Idea, It Is an Eisenhower Idea

Whenever a Republican President tells the Europeans to pay more for their own defense, the commentariat reacts as if he had asked them to pay in gold bullion and hand over the cutlery. The word "unprecedented" gets used. Somebody says the alliance is in peril. A former ambassador appears on a Sunday show with the expression of a man whose dog has been insulted.

Here is the headline they never run: "President asks Europe to carry more of its own defense; historians note this has been tried since 1951." The man who first asked was not a populist agitator. He was Dwight Eisenhower, a five-star general, the first commander of NATO, and the architect of the D-Day invasion. If asking Europe to share the load is a heresy, then Ike was the first heretic, and he did it in the opening years of the alliance. That is the thesis of this essay: burden sharing is not a scandal and not a gimmick. It is a founding principle, it has been pressed by presidents of both parties for three-quarters of a century, and a serious alliance is one in which the question is asked out loud.

The argument in four steps

I will give you the case the way a debater would, so you can check each step.

1. An alliance is a bargain, and a bargain has to be fair to survive. If one side pays most of the bills for decades and the other side pays much less, resentment builds at home, and political support for the arrangement wears out.
2. The American garrison in Europe was meant as a temporary support, not a permanent substitute. That is how its first commander understood it.
3. Pressure from Washington has always been part of how the alliance moved. Every time the allies raised their game, it was because the Americans made a stink.
4. Therefore asking for burden sharing is not hostility to the alliance. It is the way the alliance has always been kept in working order.

Let's test each step against the record.

Ike, the first commander

When the North Atlantic Treaty came into force in 1949, it was a paper promise. The Korean War, which started in June 1950, turned it into a military organization. President Truman named Eisenhower as the first Supreme Allied Commander Europe, and Ike took up his post at the new headquarters outside Paris in the spring of 1951.

Eisenhower understood the point of the exercise perfectly. In testimony to Congress in early 1951 he argued that American troops in Europe should be there for a period, as part of building up the Europeans' ability to defend themselves, and that if they were still needed a decade later the project would have failed. Think about that: the first commander of the alliance judged his own success by how soon the Americans could leave. Historians can quibble over the exact words, but the sentiment was widely reported and widely understood at the time.

As President, Eisenhower pursued the idea that Europe should bear a larger share. He backed the creation of a European Defense Community, a plan to fold European forces, including German forces, into a single structure. In August 1954 the French National Assembly killed it. The fallback was to bring West Germany into NATO itself, which happened in May 1955. Eisenhower's other great defense idea, the "New Look," leaned on nuclear deterrence in part because it was cheaper than matching Soviet armies man for man, and it reflected his lifelong worry that defense spending, if unchecked, would damage the economy it was meant to protect. He would later warn about the military-industrial complex in his farewell address of January 1961. This was not a man who treated the defense budget as a blank check, whether his own or Europe's.

The Mansfield years: the other party asks too

The idea did not belong only to Republicans. In 1966 Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, the Democratic majority leader, introduced a resolution urging a substantial reduction of American forces stationed in Europe. He tried again repeatedly, and in 1971 his amendment drew real support in the Senate before the Nixon administration mobilized a heavy lobbying effort and defeated it. Mansfield's reasoning was simple: Europe had recovered from the war, it was prosperous, and it ought to carry more of its own defense.

I mention this because it shows how bipartisan the instinct was. The Mansfield push was a Democratic one, in the era of Vietnam, and part of its energy came from the cost of the war and from balance-of-payments worries. The Nixon administration did not defend the troop levels because it thought burden sharing was wrong. It defended them because it did not want to hand the Soviets a unilateral concession at the very moment Brezhnev was floating talks on mutual reductions that May. The principle was agreed. The timing and the method were argued.

The ask kept coming. In 1978 the allies pledged a sustained increase in their defense spending in real terms, a response to Washington's concerns. In 1984, Senator Sam Nunn, a Georgia Democrat, offered an amendment to cut American troops in Europe unless the allies improved their conventional forces. It did not pass, but it made the allies pay attention. In June 2011, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who served under presidents of both parties, delivered a farewell speech in Brussels warning that American patience with an alliance in which some members did not carry their weight was wearing thin.

So when the argument comes up again, it comes with a long pedigree. President Trump has pressed the allies in blunter language than most of his predecessors used, and the press treated that as a break with tradition. It was the same ask in a different accent.

Wales, 2014: the pledge

The most important modern milestone came after Russia seized Crimea in March 2014. At the NATO summit in Wales, in early September of that year, the allies agreed on a defense investment pledge. Those who were not already spending two percent of their gross domestic product on defense promised to halt any decline and to aim to move toward that level within a decade, and all of them agreed that a fifth of their defense budgets should go to major equipment and related research. The two percent figure was not new. It had been an informal benchmark among the allies for some years. What was new was that the heads of government put their names to a pledge and a deadline.

I will not quote current percentages here, because they change from year to year and you should look them up from the NATO and national budget sources when you need them. The important thing is the principle. A pledge made in public at the head-of-government level can be held against them, and Republicans should hold them to it, including at election time in their own countries.

The economics of the free rider

There is a respectable body of scholarship behind this. In 1966 the economists Mancur Olson and Richard Zeckhauser published a paper on the economics of alliances. Their argument was that in an alliance, defense is a "public good": if the big member provides protection, the small members get it whether or not they pay. The small members therefore have an incentive to under-contribute and let the big member carry them. That is the free-rider problem, and it is not an insult. It is a description of what any sensible person would do if he were handed a free ride.

What follows is that the free-rider will keep riding as long as the driver keeps stopping. The only way to change behavior is to change the incentives, and the incentive that works is the credible possibility that the driver will not carry the passenger forever. That is why the gentlest-sounding American presidents, as well as the bluntest, have used pressure. It is also the economics behind the point made in Why Deterrence Is a Promise You Have to Be Willing to Keep: a commitment that is cheap for the beneficiary gets stretched, and a commitment that is shared gets stronger.

A hypothetical with the arithmetic shown

Here is a simple picture, labelled as a hypothetical so nobody mistakes it for a budget. Four households share the cost of a well that costs 100 dollars a month to keep running. The biggest household pays 70 and each of the other three pays 10. That is 70 + 10 + 10 + 10 = 100, and the big household carries 70 percent of the load while the three others carry ten percent apiece.

Now suppose the three smaller households each raise their share from 10 to 20. The bill for the well is still 100, but the big household now owes 100 - (20 + 20 + 20) = 40. Its share has fallen from 70 percent to 40 percent without anyone being thrown out of the neighborhood. Or suppose the big household keeps paying 70 and the others add their extra 30 on top. Then the neighborhood has 130 dollars to spend and a better well. Either way, everybody is safer, and nobody has been insulted.

Notice what did not happen. Nobody threatened to drain the well. The big household did not need to. It needed only to say, with a straight face, that the arrangement had to be fair to last. That is the entire demand, and it is a modest one.

The strongest objections

A fair account has to give the other side its best shots.

Objection one: counting percentages of GDP is crude. It is. A country can hit a target by padding pensions or counting items that do not make soldiers fight. What matters is capability, readiness and munitions. A conservative should agree. The percentage is a rough tripwire, not a goal in itself, and the better question is what the money buys. See A Worksheet for Reading Any Defense Budget Number Without Being Fooled for a way to read a budget line.

Objection two: Europe contributes in ways the numbers do not capture. True. Host nations provide land, facilities and political support for American bases, and European governments joined the campaign in Afghanistan after September 11, as described in The One Time NATO's Article 5 Was Invoked, and Who Answered the Call. These things count.

Objection three: American troops in Europe serve American interests. Also true. Bases there support American operations well beyond the continent, from Africa to the Middle East. This is a good reason to station forces abroad, but it is not a reason to avoid asking partners to share costs. If the bases serve both sides, both sides should chip in.

Objection four: public pressure may backfire. A fair worry. If an ally believes the promise is conditional, it may hedge, and a hedging ally can be a weaker ally. The answer is to deliver the message with clarity and consistency, and to pair it with reassurance about the core commitment. Ike managed to do both. The ask is made by someone who plainly intends to stay.

What the pattern tells you

Look at the shape of the story. The pressure came from Eisenhower in the 1950s, from Mansfield in the 1960s and 70s, from Nunn in the 1980s, from Gates in 2011, from the summit pledge of 2014. Each time, the allies responded in part. Each time, they drifted back. The arc is not one of betrayal by Europe or tyranny by Washington. It is the normal pattern of a long partnership where one partner is much richer and more powerful than the others. The way to handle that is to keep asking, politely and persistently, and to make the cost of failing to respond visible to voters on both sides of the Atlantic.

There is a deeper conservative point here. A government that is asked to give up something unconditionally gets lazy. A government that is told "the help is real, but the help is also a partnership" gets serious. We apply this to welfare, to foreign aid and to every other program. Europe is not exempt just because the subject is glamorous. A country that wants a permanent American shield on credit has not yet understood that credit is a form of dependency.

For the wider family argument on the right about how heavily to engage abroad, see Hawks, Restrainers, Realists and Nationalists on the Right, Compared. For a historical account of the party's first great split on the question, read Taft Versus Eisenhower and the Republican Fight Over the World. And for the case that alliances are worth keeping up, see Peace Through Strength Is Older Than Reagan and It Still Works.

The bottom line

• Burden sharing is as old as NATO. Eisenhower asked for it in 1951, Mansfield for it in the 1960s and 70s, and the allies pledged it again in 2014.
• The ask is not an attack on the alliance. It is the condition for keeping the alliance alive at home, where taxpayers have to approve it.
• Judge the allies by what their money buys, not only by percentage lines, and hold them to the pledges their leaders signed.
• Pair the pressure with a clear commitment. An ally that doubts the promise will hedge, and a hedge helps nobody but the adversary.
• Next time someone calls the demand shocking, ask them to find the President since 1951 who never made it.