Lawfare Daily: The Fallacy of NATO's New Spending Target

Summary

Summary of "Lawfare Daily: The Fallacy of NATO's New Spending Target"

Podcast Information:

• Title: The Lawfare Podcast
• Host/Author: The Lawfare Institute
• Episode: Lawfare Daily: The Fallacy of NATO's New Spending Target
• Release Date: August 5, 2025

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Introduction

In the August 5, 2025 episode of The Lawfare Podcast, hosted by the Lawfare Institute, Anastasia Lopatina moderates a critical discussion with experts Minna Allender and Max Bergman. The episode delves into NATO’s newly agreed-upon defense spending target of 5% of GDP, examining its implications, potential shortcomings, and the broader context of European defense capabilities.

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NATO’s New Defense Spending Target

The episode centers on the NATO summit held approximately a month prior, where all NATO allies committed to spending 5% of their GDP on defense—a target long advocated by former U.S. President Donald Trump and also supported by Ukraine.

Anastasia Lopatina opens the discussion by highlighting the general celebration surrounding the 5% target in Ukraine, where it aligns with Ukraine’s longstanding push for increased European defense spending. However, both guests express significant skepticism about the effectiveness and underlying motivations of this pledge.

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Critical Perspectives on the 5% Target

Minna Allender critiques the 5% spending target, arguing that it serves as a distraction from more pressing needs. She states:

"I don't think that it's very sort of advantageous or very useful to have a spending target when what we need to be focused on is improving and enhancing European capabilities."
[04:28]

Minna emphasizes that the focus should shift from merely increasing spending to developing specific capabilities. She points out that most European allies, except the United States, are unlikely to reach the 5% target, rendering the pledge more symbolic than practical.

Max Bergman echoes these concerns, referring to the summit’s outcome as “brain death,” indicating a fundamental flaw in NATO’s approach. He explains:

"What NATO has generated is an alliance that is really focused on the United States, where the United States provides the majority of the combat power and Europeans sort of dock in. And we're looking at a world now where the United States may not be there for Europeans to dock into."
[06:21]

Max argues that the 5% target does not account for the structural inefficiencies within Europe’s defense spending. He highlights the lack of coordination among European nations, leading to a fragmented defense infrastructure that would be ineffective even if collectively meeting the spending target.

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Issues with European Defense Coordination

The discussion delves into specific examples illustrating the challenges of achieving effective defense coordination in Europe:

1. Inconsistent Equipment Standards:

   • Max cites the issue of different countries adopting variations of the same military equipment, such as infantry fighting vehicles with mismatched ammunition calibers, complicating interoperability.
   • Example: "Czechs and the Slovaks... different ammunition. If you think about this, and this scales across Europe, where there's Italian vehicles, there's a great Finnish company, Patria. ... it's a nightmare."
     [16:11]

2. Failed Co-Development Attempts:

   • Minna discusses the NH90 helicopter project, which suffered delays and technical issues due to differing national requirements, leading to inefficiencies and premature retirement of the aircraft.
   • Example: "The helicopter NH90... 10 plus year delay in Sweden actually receiving these helicopters."
     [20:10]

3. Pension Spending vs. Defense Budget:

   • Both guests highlight how some nations might divert non-essential expenses, such as pensions, to meet the defense budget targets without genuinely enhancing defense capabilities.
   • Example from Max: "Europe has deep structural problems in how it spends... money spent on pensions, other things like that, and everyone has their own companies."
     [07:47]

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Historical and Psychological Context

Minna provides a historical backdrop, discussing the “peace dividend” period post-Cold War, where European nations significantly reduced defense spending under the assumption that large-scale war was obsolete. This led to:

• Decreased Military Capabilities:

  • Countries like Denmark scrapped ground-based air defenses, believing the threat was negligible.
  • Example: "Denmark got rid of its ground-based air defense, because it didn't expect anybody to ever want to like shoot missiles at Copenhagen."
    [30:42]

• Psychological Impact:

  • The collective belief that war was a thing of the past resulted in underestimating the potential for renewed conflict on European soil.
  • Example: "Nobody... could have imagined like even five years ago... that there could be war again on their territory."
    [30:42]

---

Proposed Solutions and Future Directions

Moving towards solutions, Max Bergman suggests a shift from arbitrary GDP targets to a more strategic allocation of resources based on national strengths and collaborative efforts. He proposes:

• Europeanized Defense Forces:

  • Forming integrated European military units where countries contribute based on their specific strengths, enhancing overall effectiveness without uniformly increasing spending.
  • Example: "A European rapid reaction force... that would replace the United States."
    [33:47]

• Financial Mechanisms:

  • Utilizing EU financial instruments to fund defense initiatives, allowing for pooled resources and larger-scale projects.
  • Example: "The EU could go to capital markets and borrow 500 billion euros... used to rearm and recapitalize European militaries."
    [33:47]

Minna Allender adds that increasing industrial output and developing a unified European defense industrial base are crucial. She emphasizes:

"Supporting Ukraine and integrating Ukraine into European defense arrangements... should be considered a continent-wide task."
[37:04]

Minna also highlights the importance of aligning defense spending with actual capability development rather than meeting arbitrary GDP percentages.

---

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

1. Minna Allender on Spending Targets:

   "I just think that if you want to make sure that Europeans will fail to develop independent capability to operate without the US, then this is how you need to go about it."
   [04:28]

2. Max Bergman on NATO’s Dependence on the US:

   "NATO has always existed around the United States being the guarantor of European security."
   [07:47]

3. Minna Allender on Military Capability Investment:

   "It should be much smarter about this and how to be forward looking instead of just replacing something that we're used to."
   [06:08]

4. Max Bergman on European Defense Integration:

   "NATO doesn't want European defense integration... It's a real problem."
   [19:07]

5. Minna Allender on Peace Dividend Psychology:

   "Nobody... could have imagined like even five years ago... that there could be war again on their territory."
   [30:42]

---

Concluding Insights

The discussion concludes on a somewhat optimistic note, acknowledging ongoing efforts to enhance European defense capabilities:

• Coordinated Nuclear Responses:

  • Minna highlights a groundbreaking agreement between France and the UK to coordinate their nuclear deterrent, marking a significant step towards European strategic autonomy. She remarks:

    "Why I consider this so revolutionary is basically that France has until now always refused any kinds of coordination arrangements in the nuclear domain."
    [41:56]

• German Defense Spending:

  • Max points out the substantial increase in Germany’s military budget following the removal of constitutional constraints, which is set to bolster European defense infrastructure.

    "German military has spent a lot of money in the past and not gotten a lot for it... there is a huge increase in German military capacity coming."
    [45:13]

Both guests agree that while challenges remain, strategic shifts towards better coordination, capability-focused spending, and integrated defense mechanisms are essential for Europe's future security and autonomy.

---

Conclusion

The episode effectively critiques NATO’s 5% GDP defense spending target, highlighting its potential to distract from more meaningful capability development and the structural issues within European defense coordination. Minna Allender and Max Bergman advocate for a more strategic, integrated approach to defense spending that prioritizes capability enhancement and collaborative efforts over arbitrary financial benchmarks. The discussion underscores the necessity for Europe to reassess its defense posture in the face of evolving geopolitical threats and diminishing reliance on U.S. military support.

Transcript

[Podcast Host]

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[Max Bergman]

What NATO has generated is an alliance that is really focused on the United States, where the United States provides the majority of the combat power and Europeans sort of dock in. And we're looking at a world now where the United States may not be there for Europeans to dock into. And that requires really a wholesale rethink of how Europe does defense. And what we saw at NATO was just like pretending that everything was going to be the same.

[Podcast Announcer]

It's the Lawfare podcast.

[Anastasia Lopatina]

I'm Anastasia Lopatina, Ukraine Fellow at lawfare, with Minna Allender, an associate fellow at.

[Podcast Announcer]

Chatham House Europe Program, and Max Bergman.

[Anastasia Lopatina]

The Director of the Europe, Russia and.

[Podcast Announcer]

Eurasia Program at the center for Strategic and International Studies.

[Minna Allender]

I think maybe my final sort of my problem with this all is that it's not smart to spend a lot of money like if you can spend less for the same effect, absolutely. That should be the goal and not sort of like just reaching some kind of an arbitrary spending target.

[Anastasia Lopatina]

I spoke to Minna and Max about NATO's new defense spending target and why both of them think that increasing that.

[Podcast Announcer]

Number might be missing the point.

[Anastasia Lopatina]

We're going to be talking about the NATO summit that happened around a month ago. Both of you were pretty critical about what happened at that summit. The sort of the big flashy news out of the summit was, of course, that all NATO allies agreed to spend 5% of their GDP on defense, which is what Trump wanted them to do for a very long time. I'm based in Ukraine. This news was certainly very much celebrated here because it's also something that Ukraine has been kind of pushing on for a long time. Right. That Europe needs to step up, needs to spend more, because it's a very dangerous moment for everybody. But as I've said, both of you are pretty critical. Max, you called your article on the subject NATO's brain death. So you were very sort of direct, and we'll get to that. But, Minna, I want to start with you. So you said in your column about it, the column that you wrote for your substack northern flank notes, you said that the spins and target, which was undoubtedly the key piece of news from the summit, that was actually a distraction. So what is it distracting us from? Where should we actually be paying attention when we talk about this?

[Minna Allender]

Yeah, so first of all, this applies to every other NATO ally except the U.S. so we need to start with that. The U.S. has no intention of spending 3.5%, or maybe it almost does at the moment, but it has no intention of going up to 5. So this only applies to the European allies and Canada. And my point about the distraction is that I don't think that it's very sort of advantageous or very useful to have a spending target when what we need to be focused on is improving and enhancing European capabilities. So what we should have is capability development targets. And of course, yes, those exist within the NATO defence planning process, and NATO does assign capability targets to its allies. But there's some questions right now about whether those targets are still up to date and how functional that process is, given the difficulties with the US within the alliance. And I just think that basically, if you want to make sure that Europeans will fail to develop independent capability to operate without the US Then this is how you need to go about it. You need to make them focus on the maximum amount of money that they are spending and not so much what they are spending on. So this is why I think that it's going to create exactly the wrong incentive structures.

[Anastasia Lopatina]

Minna, just in very simple words, when you talk about capability targets, you just mean the amount of stuff France, let's say, has to have of a particular weapon. Right.

[Minna Allender]

So it's not only sort of like the amount of equipment, but what kind of equipment. And that's actually even more important because Europe has been relying on and depended on a lot of especially strategic enablers that the US has provided. The most important capability that the US Brings into the alliance is obviously the nuclear deterrent that the US Then extends to its treaty allies. So that is one major thing. But there's a number of other capabilities that the US has provided and that the European countries simply don't have. It's not only about the amount of equipment that European countries invest in, but also what they do. And then just like another additional aspect is that Europe should not strive for just replacing whatever the US has provided until now, because if Europe, whose posture will be essentially a regional and defensive one, is trying to sort of like replicate or replace US capabilities, and the US Has a global force posture, that's not going to work. Also, we need to sort of like do an analysis. What do we need in Europe? It's not necessarily the same things that the US Needs for its global operations and that the US has provided. So we also need to be sort of like forward looking and analyze how is the battlefield developing, sort of like bringing all the technical developments, not least from Ukraine. Right. And then figure out, like, how to be smart about this and how to be forward looking instead of just replacing something that we're used to.

[Max Bergman]

Yeah, maybe to sort of pick up on the brain death comment, which was a play on. Emmanuel Macron during the first Trump administration, described NATO as brain death because Turkey had just invaded Syria and the alliance was sort of at cross purposes. The reason why I called it brain death is that we've just spent the last decade fighting about defense spending targets of every country getting to 2%, and now suddenly we're going to go to 3.5 and 5%. And let's be clear, Europe does need to spend more in order to defend itself, particularly in a moment in where the United States looks like it's planning massive troop cuts, something not discussed at the NATO summit. Another reason why that summit, I felt was brain death. It was just about Europeans spending more and more and there was no discussion about what the US Was actually planning to do. In Europe. But to me, if Europe spends 3.5 to 5%, then it's spending as much as the United States is on defense. And maybe that's great, but that would make Europe this huge potential military power. And then you have to ask yourself, would Europe actually be this huge military power that would come out of spending 3.5% to 5%? And the answer is sort of. But the problem is that Europe has deep structural problems in how it spends, because Europe doesn't spend as Europe. Europe spends as a collection of at least a NATO, roughly 30 countries that all have their own national defense industrial bases, national defense industrial complexes, different ministries of defense. And some work really well, such as in Finland, where Mina is from, because they're deeply focused on the threat. Others not so much because they're really far away from Russia. And there's a lot of money spent on pensions, other things like that, and everyone has their own companies. And so it's a mess. What NATO has generated is an alliance that is really focused on the United States, where the United States provides the majority of the combat power and Europeans sort of dock in. And we're looking at a world now where the United States may not be there for Europeans to dock into. And that requires really a wholesale rethink of how Europe does defense. And what we saw at NATO was just like pretending that everything was going to be the same. And maybe just one other quick point is that there is a political dimension to this and that if Europeans are going to start spending 3.5 to 5% on defense, and you look at French politics right now where they have a budget deficit above 5%, you have a far left and a far right, neither of which is particularly concerned about Russia. And suddenly you're going to say you're going to have to cancel public holidays, you're going to have to cut health care spending. I think this could really create a domestic political backlash in Europe, saying, why don't we just sort of come to terms with Russia? I don't want to lose my health care and social spending for Ukraine. And I don't think Europe needs to be in that guns versus butter conversation. But what NATO just did is sort of thrust Europe into a straight up guns versus butter conversation that I think will not end well for Ukraine or for European defense and security. So I would try to avoid that almost at all costs. And I don't think Europe really needs to go there if it really looked at how it spends.

[Anastasia Lopatina]

We should also mention the important point that the 5%, the pledge is split into these two categories, right? The 3.5% of the core defensive requirements. So that's like actual guns and weapons. And then the 1.5% of the 5% is like defense related infrastructure, which could really mean anything. Italian bridges to various places as far as I can tell. That's why they sort of did that, right? To make sure that everyone agrees on the pledge.

[Minna Allender]

So this is basically exactly the problem with this. And that highlights that it's a lip service pledge. This was one way, I mean, as a political move, maybe it was the necessary thing to do and maybe it was the right thing to do to make sure that NATO survives this summit and that you have something to pacify Trump with and you give him some kind of a win and then he can stop thinking about NATO for a while. Because I believe that the less he thinks about the alliance, the better it is for the alliance, probably. Which also makes it a bit awkward that the next summits have been already agreed on, because it would have been great to take a little break right now, I think. Anyways, so there's this issue of the infrastructure related or like resilience related. 1.5% spending on principle. I think it's a great idea. A lot of European countries really need to spend more money on their sort of like public infrastructure, dual use infrastructure, their general societal resilience and so on. So this is not at all a stupid idea per se. But obviously this has so much comedic potential in terms of what kinds of things NATO member states are going to try to count towards this 1.5%. You mentioned this Italian idea of building a bridge to Sicily for like, I think something like 13 billion euros. And Max mentioned actually pensions, which is a huge issue in terms of that. When you focus on the spending and the amount of money that is being spent, you don't really, I mean, you need really sort of rigid structures of like how it's spent if you want it to make sense. Because otherwise it can be spent on sort of unproductive items such as pensions. I mean, I'm not saying that service members shouldn't be getting good pensions, but if that's like close to 20% of your budget, then there may be an issue. And here we are seeing like exactly what I mentioned. The wrong incentive structures is that countries are going to start looking into all kinds of things and figure out whether they can count it towards these numbers. And what Italy, for example, announced that it's contemplating now in order to sort of meet this pledge without spending much more in real terms. Is that they might start counting the pensions into their defense budget, which they have not done before. So this is sort of like the issue that we're encountering here and why it's not sort of like necessarily a productive way of doing this. And then another thing, actually, this is something that I find meaningful. And what was like the best part of this pledge, and it was that the European countries and Canada can count their support for Ukraine into this 3.5%. So this is actually really a good thing and in my opinion the one thing that we should be now throwing money at. So this would be like an actually productive way of making good on this pledge and actually sort of moving towards it right now in the short term and in the long term we just need to be much smarter about this. And this is something where the EU actually comes in on the picture. The EU is really trying to create a lot of financial incentives for, for the European countries to co procure and co produce equipment to overcome these inefficiencies that Max was talking about earlier. So there's all kinds of rules to getting EU funding that require that you have to be either procuring or producing jointly with other European companies and that a certain percentage of the equipment has to be made within the EU and so on. So this is actually, in my opinion, almost more important, important than the NATO defence spending pledge. And this is going to have a real transformational effect in Europe if it's applied. In the ambitious interpretation both of you.

[Anastasia Lopatina]

Have mentioned that Europe is pretty bad with coordinating what each country produces. And it's sort of like every state has its own situation with its own capabilities and talking about some European force that may come together and actually respond to Russian aggression. It's pretty nonsensical. Can you give some examples of that, either one of you, of, I don't know, stupid decisions of buying certain systems that just doesn't make sense for a certain country or for several countries?

[Max Bergman]

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a ton of examples. My favorite one in the aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the Czechs and the Slovaks used to be the same country. Czechoslovakia. They all had the same Soviet era infantry fighting vehicles that were exactly the same because they were the same country and they gave them away to Ukraine. And then they agreed that this was a good thing, that they were going to go buy the Swedish CV90 to replace it. A much better infantry fighting vehicle. But there's different gun manufacturers in the Czech Republic and Slovakia and So one has a 36mm calibre gun and the other has 30. So suddenly you went from two countries that had the exact same system, exact same ammunition, now having sort of the same vehicle, but then with different ammunition. If you think about this, and this scales across Europe, where there's Italian vehicles, there's a great Finnish company, Patria. And so what this means is think about how Europe would deploy to actually fight as Europe. It would be a total nightmare. And Ukrainians have experienced this because what they are getting from Europeans are they're hand me down equipment that is just of all different variety. And what that means is that you have to have a maintenance guy that has to know how to fix some Italian vehicle, a German vehicle, a Finnish vehicle. You have to have spare parts for all of that. You have to have all the different ammunition. It's a total nightmare. What is not thought about is how does Europe actually fight together as Europe? What they do at NATO is there is no Europe. There's just a bunch of individual countries, could be countries from all over the world. There is sort of no Europe at NATO. And I find this extremely distressing. And what the European Union is trying to do is put the Europe in European defense. That is really difficult because NATO doesn't want that. Many European member states don't want that. Many national ministries of defense are terrified of having the EU come in and start sort of micromanaging their procurement. This is the bureaucratic turf war that is really deep. They want to control defense spending. And what we see in Europe, actually we've done a study at csis, is that when Europeans spend more money on defense, they cooperate less. And when they have less money, they cooperate more because then they have to extract efficiencies. And the Finns have to call the Italians and say, okay, can we buy this together and maybe create some economies of scale? When they don't have to do that, life is easier. But then what the end result is, it's the tragedy of the commons, is that everyone has different stuff. And so how does this all congeal to then defend Europe? The answer is it hasn't really been a problem because the US would just be there for Europe. Finland has taken this very seriously. But for others it's just like, well, America will lead, we'll dock in and provide whatever we can. But if the US isn't going to be there, it requires a vast restructuring.

[Minna Allender]

So I have also some other examples on this because obviously that's one very typical example that Maxis gave, but there's so many more. Generally in the past European attempts at co developing equipment have been very inefficient and actually have not produced the sort of like economies of scale and the sort of benefits that you would expect in terms of cost efficiency and also like time efficiency. And very often it has been partly because participating countries have their own specific requirements. So Max mentioned one and then there was this very tragic example of the helicopter NH90 where for example the Swedes for some reason wanted the helicopter to be 24 cm higher on the inside, sort of like measurements which then led to a 10 plus year delay in Sweden actually receiving these helicopters.

[Anastasia Lopatina]

Oh my God.

[Minna Allender]

And by now actually other countries are already just retiring this helicopter prematurely because it has also been just like a very bad product with high maintenance costs and a lot of technical trouble and so on. So this is like an incredibly typical example of like. And it was, it was also a lot in the news while Europe was going through this Leopard Maybelline tank debate, when a number of European countries are trying to convince Germany, that is the manufacturer of these tanks, to donate these and give the permission for others to donate these tanks to Ukraine. And then it turned out that actually although a number of European countries operate these tanks, a Swedish Leopard is not the same as a German one. Actually the Swedes even call it something else, but that's another story. But anyway, sort of like that, they are actually not very compatible. And I also have one very fresh example of what this kind of focus on sort of really fast as possible procurement right now can cause in terms of panic buying effects. So on the one hand it's good if people or European countries start procuring more like a standard variation of equipment and they stop sort of like adding all these national special curiosities to it which then lead to whole new production lines for each country that is, that is ordering basically the equipment that is supposed to be the same thing for everybody. So that's a good thing. But then on the other hand, Denmark is a great example right now of a country that is really seriously trying to hurry about getting their military back on track again. So Denmark 20 years ago scrapped its ground based air defense. And what they're now doing, they opted for not only one European system, but three. So they are going to operate in the short term three different variations of basically the same system. So this also shows you then. And I found this very curious because I didn't think that learning to operate a myriad of variations of the same system would be the lesson that Europeans to want, want to learn from Ukraine, which was also something that Max was just talking about. But apparently this is where we're at now because countries are now only after this Trump induced shock, waking up to this extreme haze that they're in in terms of trying to now get their militaries back on track. So there's all kinds of problems that may result from this in terms of interoperability of equipment, sometimes perhaps even within the same country.

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[Anastasia Lopatina]

All of this sounds terrible and extremely chaotic. And so, I mean, excuse my name question, but how could they let this happen? They being NATO and eu, and this is partly an emotional question, but also, Max, you mentioned that the EU is now trying to sort of fix this problem, at least somewhat and put the Europe into NATO. And NATO doesn't really want that. Why is that? Because they prefer American hegemony which no longer exists, basically, yeah.

[Max Bergman]

So let me just first say, I think part of the reason why there's all this discussion about the defense industrial production is because Europe is basically out of weapons because they've given so much of their weaponry to Ukraine. And so when looking at the war in Ukraine, what you see is it's an attritional war where it's all about your ability to have lots of ammo and bombs and other things to throw at your adversary. So we've sort of back in an era where massive defence industrial production is really critical and how Europe got here. I think first the blame should always go to the Europeans who really embraced and hugged the peace dividend after the Cold War and really cut their defense spending, cut their militaries. War was a thing of the past. So that's, that's, you know, that's where blame lies. Secondly, though, the United States I think missed a switch here that after the Cold War we made a choice that we did not want European defense integration. We were nervous about the EU getting involved in defense. And you look at what the EU was doing in the 1990s, had all these really ambitious defense plans and that was embraced it was actually embraced by Jacques Chirac and Tony Blair in St. Malo in France in December of 1998, where they agreed to create a European Rapid reaction Force to begin integrating European defense efforts. And this was going to be the kernel of what was going to be a more integrated European force. A few days later, Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State, took the stage at NATO at the North Atlantic Council and said no, said no duplication. We don't want the EU to duplicate NATO. We just made this huge bet to expand NATO eastward. We are putting all our eggs in the NATO basket and we don't want the EU to be involved. And we wanted effectively to maintain American presence in Europe. We wanted to maintain the status quo that emerged from the Cold War, which frankly, when NATO was created, it was not an American, we did not want, was a British led initiative. We wanted to create a European Defense Community, a European military. And then NATO was sort of the fallback option. But anyway, so where we are now is that NATO has existed and has always existed around the United States being the guarantor of European security. And we have been very hostile to any EU effort that has tried to organize European defenses in a more integrated way. That began to shift during the Biden administration somewhat, but not fully. And so what we have at NATO is just a large collection of countries that basically operate as if they're all from different continents. It's a real problem. That's why I think the summit has not begun to reckon with that. What happens if you pull the US back from NATO is that there isn't really a European pillar that doesn't exist yet that I think has to be built. How we got here was, I think, the US assuming we were always going to be in Europe, Europeans neglecting their own defense and Europeans now not working together. And we're still not seeing that, I think, at the EU level as much as we actually should be seeing. And there's a lot of reticence and bureaucratic opposition inside of Europe to working together as Europeans when it comes to defense, because that hasn't happened yet. Unlike all these other areas where Europe actually works together quite effectively.

[Minna Allender]

If I may just add some sort of, maybe a little bit more psychological aspects to it. I think that this peace dividend was really important in the sense that Europeans fully embraced and internalized it. And it seemed like the fulfillment of the European peace project, sort of, that we had removed the eventuality of war from this continent. And nobody in especially Western Europe and continental Europe more widely, could have imagined like Even five years ago and most people probably still can't imagine that there could be war again on their territory. So especially this kind of idea of territorial defense, that was the whole thing during the Cold War when Europe was the main theater in a way that completely got removed from the equation in the European imagination. And I'm talking mostly of course about like sort of continental Western Europe. And that's sort of like the whole thing that, that's why Denmark got rid of its ground based air defense, because it didn't expect anybody to ever want to like shoot missiles at Copenhagen. And that's why the Dutch just assumed that they will not really need a land force anymore because they didn't expect that there could ever be any territorial threat to their security. So wars were happening somewhere further away. And it was sort of like this era of the war of choice. Like you can choose a place and timing almost more or less like of when you want to go to war and you can conduct war somewhere far away. It was anyways US wars, especially in the Middle east in the 2000s, that were sort of like the main issue for Europeans to. The question was do European allies participate in those wars or not? And it was sort of like it was sort of voluntary in a way. It wasn't any kind of. It was not the Europeans choice to sort of go to war there. It was more about alliance solidarity. Why then a lot of Europeans opted for fighting with America in Afghanistan and elsewhere. So this is sort of like it has been a really traumatic and dramatic experience in Europe to realize that war came back to this continent because everybody assumed that this was a thing of the past. So I think that psychological effect was really profound after the Cold War. And that also explains why countries were so comfortable with getting rid of so much of sort of like really essential national defense capability that they felt safe and comfortable enough without any sort of like proper air defense or land force and so on.

[Anastasia Lopatina]

Okay, before we turn to complete doom and gloom, let's speak about solutions to this terrible problem. Max, in your piece I thought it was really interesting. You talked about how perhaps the smarter thing to do is not for everyone to spend the exact amount of their GDP on defense, but for states to sort of split responsibilities and choose who's good at what. Right. And then collaborate. So can you talk a bit about that? What's the smarter way to go here?

[Max Bergman]

Yeah, and let me just also preface part of this. NATO is a huge success story, as is the European Union in basically resolving all the security dilemmas that previously prompted European countries to spend all this money on defense. And so if you're a country like Spain, the problem is that you don't have really significant security threats. So Spain is probably actually spending the right amount and probably even more than it needs to for its, its security threats. But so then asking a country to just spend another like 1% of GDP, potentially cut into their social welfare spending out of solidarity, when there isn't sort of a direct contribution to European security, it's indirect, I think is not the way to go. And so I think the way to do this is, is to say, okay, countries like Finland are going to be spending a ton because they're super rightly paranoid about their 1300 kilometer border with Russia. But what is Spain doing to contribute to that? And the answer is they are doing things, they are participating in NATO, air policing in the Baltic states and other things like that. But I think what needs to be thought about is what are the tangible contributions that non frontline states in particular countries like Spain and Italy. Spain and Italy have a larger army than the United Kingdom. How do you leverage that scale that Europe has with 450 million people, 1.4 million people in uniform to battlefield effects? What I would suggest is begin to think, well, maybe we should have a Europeanized force where Spain, Italy, other smaller states, the Netherlands, Belgium contribute to in some ways Europe, a ground force that would replace the United States, maybe a European rapid reaction force. Or maybe Spain picks up the tab for Spain and Italy and others for the EU borrowing a whole lot of money. The EU could go to capital markets tomorrow and borrow 500 billion euros. And an economist has outlined this, that it would effectively be a cost of 15 billion a year in debt servicing. That pot of money could be used to rearm and recapitalize European militaries. And maybe Spain and Italy for the next 10 years pick up the tab there and that's their contribution. That would be way more meaningful, I think, than Italy building a bridge connecting Sicily and Messina in terms of European defense. So that I think is, let's be more creative, let's try to figure out ways where we're integrating European defense or moving Europe faster along the path towards European defense integration and really leveraging Europe's scale by getting countries like Spain and Italy and others to contribute more to the defense of the Baltics, the defense of Finland. I think you would find real popular support for that also, because it probably wouldn't mean that you're hitting some 3.5% target, but you're providing something really meaningful to the defense of Europe. And I think that would be much more popular thinking about solutions along that line than just saying, let's just beat up on the Spanish because they're not going to spend 3.5% and let's have that conversation again and again and again for every NATO summit for the next 10 years. And that just strikes me as totally unhelpful and really divisive within the alliance.

[Minna Allender]

So I sort of agree and sort of disagree with this suggestion because obviously the problem with the solidarity and how to measure solidarity is why we are in the first place in this whole percentage of GDP mess in a way, because that's the easiest way of measuring the amount of pain it sort of causes. Although it's also not because, like Max has mentioned this now multiple times, that people have, or like countries in Europe have vastly differing fiscal space to do this. So Denmark, for example, is able to spend a lot of money as fast as possible and buy whatever is on the shelf. They can buy it right now and place those orders without getting into these kind of ganso versus butter debates that we talked about in the beginning. But not many other European states can do that. So the ability to actually sort of like invest in the military capabilities is quite different. And for example, Finland is under much more fiscal pressure than Denmark is, although Finland is in a way closer to the threat. I would say, obviously there are some reasons for Denmark to feel more directly threatened recently. And that's in a weird way through this whole, like, Trump threat to Greenland. I would also say that the front lines are a little bit sort of like more diffused than just like the strict geographical border in the sense that Russia is waging a large scale hybrid war that reaches all the way to southern Europe as well. So the southern European countries investing in their resilience in terms of energy infrastructure and I mean, they will have to invest a lot in climate resilience because more than thousand people, Spain just experienced more than thousand extra deaths now last month, I think because of this extreme heat and so on. So the threats are also sort of like they're not the same everywhere. Like the climate threat is not as acute in the north versus the Russian threat. And so one. So I think that threats are sort of like many of them unite us all, but we experience them at different intensities. I would say, however, another way of sort of like making a meaningful contribution for those countries that are further away from the most acute Russian threat right now is of course, the industrial output as well. And now that Europe is Trying to build an actually efficiently functioning European defence, industrial and technological base. That's of course, something that can be very interesting for countries in the south or west of Europe as well. And I think that because we should all consider supporting Ukraine, and not only supporting Ukraine, but cooperating with Ukraine and integrating Ukraine into European defence arrangements that are emerging now, this should be considered a continent wide task. And that's something where everybody can contribute and it doesn't matter how far away from Ukraine you are, because all contributions count. So I think that there are ways to do this. But obviously then we get to this problem. How do you measure solidarity? I personally don't think that this percentage of GDP is a good measure simply for the reason that it amounts to so vastly different amounts in absolute terms. Estonia is already spending more than 5%, and that amounts to about 2 billion euros. So you don't get a whole lot of kit for 2 billion euros, unfortunately. Especially because everything's gonna get more expensive now that people are announcing huge pots of money. And then we can ask, does it really make sense that Germany spends 215 billion on defense? Like, is that really necessary? And also I think maybe my final sort of problem with this all is that it's not smart to spend a lot of money if you can spend less for the same effect. Absolutely, that should be the goal and not sort of like just reaching some kind of an arbitrary spending target.

[Anastasia Lopatina]

I want to pivot to talking about another column that you wrote recently, Mina, which seems to me a lot more uplifting than everything that we just talked about, but it's still very much related to European defense. So in this column about European strategic autonomy, you talked about a few recent news that you said sort of slid through the cracks and no one really paid attention to them, but they're actually pretty important. The first being that France and the UK agreed to coordinate on nuclear responses. And you said that this was so revolutionary that hell might as well just freeze next. That's the scale that you chose. So just unpack that. Why is this such a big deal and what it means for European defense? And Max, of course, feel free to jump in as well.

[Minna Allender]

So why I consider this so revolutionary is basically that France has until now always refused any kinds of coordination arrangements in the nuclear domain. Because for France, their sovereign independent nuclear deterrent is the basis of French strategic autonomy, which is incredibly important for France. And that is sort of like the one thing you need to understand about French defense thinking. That is why I do consider it very sort of like descriptive of the Times that even France is willing to take this kind of a leap and agrees to coordinate on this. So this is how important it is for France, on the one hand, to enhance Europe's own ability to take care of its defence and sort of like take charge of our destiny in a way, in terms of the strategic autonomy. And then this is of course a huge step also in the sense that France and uk, the two European nuclear powers, are showing themselves, are sort of like showcasing this kind of responsiveness to partners needs. I mean, obviously Germany is the main partner here that is extremely nervous, but obviously Germany is not alone with this nervousity about whether or not the US really is still committed to the extended nuclear deterrent. So this is very indicative of how Europe is starting to sort of look at if the worst happens and if we really cannot rely on the Americas anymore, basically effective as of now, what have we got that we can sort of somehow try to make the best of? And how far does that get us? So that's basically what this is all about. It's not about trying to in any way sort of like replicate or replace the American provided extended nuclear deterrent, because France and the UK simply lack the numbers in terms of their arsenal to do that. And also they don't have like the same variety of sort of like fields that enable sort of like also tactical nuclear warfare and so on. And their doctrines are also more limited in that regard. So. So there's no sort of idea that France and uk even together could ever sort of completely just replace the offer that the Americans have extended to the Europeans until now. But the point is sort of to make sure that we think about all these levels, from conventional to nuclear, we look at what's the status quo in Europe and what can we do with what we have now to bridge this gap? Because we are currently in an extremely vulnerable situation. And that is mainly thanks to Donald Trump, who has opened this window of vulnerability by announcing this global force posture review that will most likely result in more or less withdrawal of US troops from Europe and other uncertainties that are plaguing the transatlantic alliance right now. So we in Europe need to, of course, build up a lot, but because that's inevitably going to take a couple of years, we also need to have a look at what, what can be done faster than that and what do we have now?

[Max Bergman]

Yeah, maybe just to add, sometimes I play the role of grumpy, think tanker and say what's not happening? And oh my God, here's this gap and this needs to be done. But A lot is happening. Mina, I think, is much more level headed and points to the French UK nuclear conversation. The UK has also just done a really important strategic defense review. They've been doing a lot of these. But but this one in particular looks at lessons learned from Ukraine and how to do more with less money effectively and really focuses UK efforts on Europe, less of its global role. The German military spending after they got rid of their constitutional amendment banning debt, which was really constraining their military spending, now they are having huge defense budgets. Now, the German military has spent a lot of money in the past and not gotten a lot for it. But I think there's a huge increase in German military capacity coming. And then states like Poland, other Baltic states, Finland, Nordic air cooperation. There's a lot happening actually in Europe where the task at hand is to deter Russia. That is the primary goal of what Europe really needs to do over the next few years. And I think as much as we want to blame Donald Trump for causing this crisis of confidence within Europe about its own security and about whether America will be there, the reality is this transition was coming. And I think Biden was sort of, in some ways an illusion that America was sort of back and that everything would be the way it was. But the US has incredible security challenges and commitments in the Indo Pacific, a peer rival in China, as we've seen in the Middle east, commitments there. And Europe is the place where Europe is rich and Europeans should be able to handle their security, not necessarily become a global military superpower, but be able to deter the Russians to prevent war on the European continent or to prevent an expansion of war into NATO and the European Union. I think this is all doable, but there's a lot of steps that Europe has to take because the fear right now for Europe actually is that there would be some sort of peace agreement in Ukraine, Ukraine, that Russia would continue to mobilize its military, would continue to invest in its defense. And then round three wouldn't happen in Ukraine, but would happen in the Baltic states in 2027, 2028, as Donald Trump is still in office, where the US commitment to even come to Europe's defense may be in doubt. And I think that is the kind of more urgent nightmare scenario that I think is very unlikely, in part because it doesn't look like there's any desire to have a peace agreement in Ukraine or any ceasefire in Ukraine, which is bad, I think, in Ukraine. But that is the kind of urgent task that I think Europeans really need to sort of be focusing on in the next few years.

[Anastasia Lopatina]

I think this is the perfect spot to wrap up before it gets any more doom and gloom than already happened in this conversation. Thank you guys. This was really fascinating.

[Minna Allender]

Thank you.

[Max Bergman]

Thanks so much for having me.

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