Trump or Putin effect? European NATO states are quickly preparing for war tired? This is really the mood among the Russian people

Donald Trump will be happy: He’s not even an official presidential candidate yet, let alone back in the Oval Office. But everyone is already dancing to his tune. At least that’s how Trump is likely to view NATO’s announcement that two-thirds of allies will now meet their common defense spending target this year.

A total of 18 of NATO’s 31 countries would meet the NATO commitment by 2024 and put two percent of their economic output into defense, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said at a meeting on Wednesday. There will probably be a few more added by the end of the year.

The ‘good news’ from Brussels comes just a few days after Trump’s shocking statement that as president he would not defend a NATO country that ‘doesn’t pay its bills’. In fact, Trump would encourage Russian President Vladimir Putin to do whatever he wants with these countries. That also means an attack, as Putin did against Ukraine.

US President Joe Biden called Trump’s comments “stupid”, “dangerous” and “un-American” and Stoltenberg also reiterated on Wednesday that public doubts about NATO’s unity directly undermine the alliance’s security. At the same time, Stoltenberg also said that Trump’s criticism had a point: “It’s a point made by several successive US administrations: the Europeans and Canada need to spend more.”

Investments higher than ever before

That’s what they’re doing now. Although: they have been doing it since 2014. Back then, in the year of the annexation of Crimea, the two percent target was adopted at the NATO summit in Wales, reversing the decades-long trend of declining defense spending. The increase only really started during Trump’s first term in office from 2017. Trump explicitly praised himself for giving the Europeans a head start and now pouring “billions and billions” into NATO.

However, if you look closer, things are a little more complicated: in 2020, the increase in defense spending was only particularly large because economic output collapsed due to the pandemic. There was no Trump effect. On the contrary, the increase was constant.

In any case, there was a Putin effect: from 2022 and the attack on Ukraine, developments accelerated and European countries also increased their defense budgets. By 2023 alone, defense spending by Europeans and Canada will have increased by eleven percent. This is unprecedented, according to Secretary General Stoltenberg. By 2024, total European defense spending will reach more than $380 billion, the highest ever.

Germany, with its 100 billion in special assets, is an example of this growth. This year, Berlin is expected to invest more than 70 billion euros in its military, which amounts to about 2.01 percent. More than ever since the 1990s.

But the fact that Germany exceeds the NATO threshold this year is also due to the fact that its economy has entered a recession. This shows the limitations of the model, which only assesses defense spending in relation to economic performance, as the pandemic effect already shows.

The method is especially difficult for rich people. It is unlikely that Luxembourg, which is extremely economically strong for its size, will ever achieve NATO’s goal. In Switzerland, the two percent target would mean tripling the army budget from around 5 billion now to 16 billion.

More arms deliveries to Ukraine

When it comes to aid to Ukraine, concrete facts are crucial rather than percentages. Especially when it comes to ammunition production: “The war in Ukraine is also being decided on an ongoing basis,” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said on Wednesday, referring to the groundbreaking ceremony for a new munitions factory in Lower Saxony this week.

Germany will supply three to four times as much artillery ammunition to Ukraine this year as last year. When it comes to Trump, Pistorius warned that every word from the American election campaign must be taken seriously: “We would do well not to constantly look like a rabbit at a snake, but to do our homework, which is not always the case been. “Enough has happened” in the past ten years.

The Minister of Defense also has a clear opinion about the emerging debate about the reliability of the American nuclear umbrella and a German atomic bomb: “The last thing we really need now is the nuclear debate. This is an escalation in the discussion that we do not need.” His answer will probably go in the direction of SPD party member and top candidate for the European elections Katharina Barley, who discussed the EU’s own nuclear weapons “on the way to a European army”. (aargauerzeitung.ch)