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

[Intro]

Max Bergmann: 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, it was just like pretending that everything was going to be the same.

Anastasiia Lapatina: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Anastasiia Lapatina Ukraine fellow at Lawfare with Minna Ålander, an associate fellow at Chatham House Europe Program, and Max Bergmann, the Director of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Minna Ålander: I think maybe my final, sort of my problem with this all is that is 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.

Anastasiia Lapatina: I spoke to Minna and Max about NATO's new defense spending target and why both of them think that increasing that number might be missing the point.

[Main Podcast]

We're gonna be talking about the NATO summit that happened around a month ago. Both of you were pretty critical about what happened at that summit. Sort of the, the big flashy news outta 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, you were very sort of direct and we'll get to that. But Minna, I wanna 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 spending 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 Ålander: Yeah, so first of all, this applies to every other NATO ally except the U.S., so, 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 like going up to five, 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 sort of 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 defense planning process and NATO does assign capability targets to its allies.

But there's some questions right now about like whether those targets are still up to date and like how functional that process is given the, the difficulties with, with the U.S. 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 U.S., then this is how you need to go about it. You need to make them focused on the maximum amount of money that they're spending and not so much like what they're spending on, so this is why I think that it's going to create exactly the wrong incentive structures.

Anastasiia Lapatina: Minna, just in very simple words, when you talk about capability targets, you just mean like the amount of stuff France, let's say, has to have of a particular weapon, right?

Minna Ålander: 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, that the U.S. has provided.

The most important capability that the U.S. brings into the alliance is obviously the nuclear deterrent that the U.S. then extents to, its, its treaty allies. So that is one major thing, but there's a number of other capabilities that the U.S. 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, what they do.

And then just like another additional aspect is that Europe should not strive for just replacing whatever the U.S. 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 U.S. has a global force posture, that's not gonna work.

Also, we need to sort of like do an analysis what, what do we need in Europe? It's not necessarily the same things that the U.S. needs for its global operations. And that the U.S. 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, and then figure out like how to be smart about this and how to be for forward-looking instead of just replacing something that we're used to.

Max Bergmann: Yeah, maybe to sort of pick up on the brain death comment which was a play off–

Anastasiia Lapatina: Please.

Max Bergmann: Emmanuel Macron, during the first Trump administration described NATO as quote unquote brain death because you know, Turkey had just invaded Syria and, and every, 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, of every country getting to 2%. And now suddenly we're gonna 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 European spending more and there was no discussion about what the U.S. 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 three point a half 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 in NATO, roughly 30 countries that all have their own national defense, industrial base, national defense industrial complexes, different ministries of defense, and some work really well, such as in Finland, where Minna 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 and other things like that, and everyone has their own companies, and so it's a mess.

Like 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 gonna 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 gonna say you're gonna have to cancel public holidays, you're gonna have to cut healthcare spending.

I think this could really create a, a domestic political backlash in Europe saying, why don't we just sort of come to terms with Russia? You know, I don't wanna lose my healthcare 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 better 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, it, it, it spends.

Anastasiia Lapatina: 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, you know, Italian bridges to various places. That's 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 Ålander: 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, 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've been great to take a little break right now, I think.

Anyways, so, so there's this issue of the infrastructure related, or like resilience related 1.5% spending. On, 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 resil, 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, on, on the spending and the amount of money that is being spent you don't really, I mean, you need really sort of reaches structures of like how it's spent, if you want it to make sense 'cause 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 the, what I mentioned, the wrong incentive structures, is that like countries are gonna 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 like meet this pledge without spending much more in real terms is that they might start counting their, 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, it's not sort of like necessarily a productive way of doing this.

And then another thing, actually, this is something that I, 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 these 3.5%. So this is actually really a good thing and in my opinion, the one thing that we should be throwing money at. So this would be like an actual 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 it, 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 the European countries to co-procure and co-produce equipment to, to overcome these inefficiencies that Max was talking about earlier.

So, 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 like a certain percentage of the equipment has to be made in within the EU and so on. So this is actually, in my opinion, almost more important than the, the NATO defense spending pledge. And this is going to have a real transformational effect in Europe if it's applied in the ambitious interpretation.

Anastasiia Lapatina: Both of you 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, of that either one of you, of like, I don't know, stupid decisions of buying certain systems that just doesn't make sense, right for a certain country or for several countries?

Max Bergmann: Yeah, I mean, I think there, there's a ton of examples. My favorite one in the aftermath of, of, of Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the Czechs and the Slovak you know, used to be the same country, Czechoslovakia, they all had the same Soviet era infantry, fighting vehicles, they 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 gonna go buy the Swedish CV-90 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 36 millimeter caliber 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 you know there's Italian vehicles, there's a, 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, you know, 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. And so what is not thought about is how does Europe actually fight together as Europe. And 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. And 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. You know, 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.

If, when they don't have to do that it, 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? And the answer is, hasn't really been a problem because the U.S. would just be there you know, for, for Europe. Finland has taken this very seriously, but for others it's just like, well, you know, America will lead, we'll sort of dock in and provide whatever we can but if the U.S. isn't gonna be there, it requires a, a, a vast restructuring.

Minna Ålander: So I have also some other examples on this because obviously like that's one very typical example that Max has gave, but there's like so many more. Generally in the past European attempts at co-developing equipment have been very inefficient, inefficient and actually have not produced the sort of like economies of scale and, and, 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, the helicopter to be 24 centimeters higher on the inside, sort of like measurements, which then led to a 10 plus year delay in Sweden actually receiving these helicopters.

Anastasiia Lapatina: Oh my God.

Minna Ålander: 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, and a lot of technical trouble and so on. So this is like an incredibly typical example of like.

And, and it was, it was also a lot, in the news while Europe was going through this Leopard main battle tank debate when a number of European countries were trying to convince Germany that is the manufacturer of these tanks, to, to donate these and then give the permission for others to donate these tanks to Ukraine.

And then it turned out that actually like, 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 like not very compatible.

And I also have one very fresh example of what this kind of focus on sort of really fastest possible procurement right now can cause in terms of like panic buying effects. So on the one hand it's good if people, or like European countries start procuring more like a standard variation of, of equipment and they stop sort of like adding all these like national and special curiosities to it, which then lead to like whole new production lines for each country that is that is that is ordering basically the, the equipment that is supposed to be the same thing for everybody.

So that's a good thing. But then on the other hand, there's Denmark is a great example right now of a country that is really seriously trying to hurry about, about getting their military, 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, so this also shows you then, and, and I was, I found this, this very curious because like it was, I didn't think that learning to operate a myriad of variations of the same system would be the lesson that Europeans would want to learn from Ukraine, which is also something that Max was just talking about. But apparently this is where we're at now because like countries are now only like after this Trump induced shock waking up to this, this extreme haze that they, they 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.

Anastasiia Lapatina: All of this sounds terrible and extremely chaotic, and so. I, I mean, excuse my naive question, but how could, how could they let this happen? They being NATO and EU. And this is like partly an emotional question, but also like 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?

Max Bergmann: Yeah, so lemme 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 outta 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 a attritional war where it's all about your ability to have lots of ammo and, and bombs and other things to throw at your adversary. So we've sort of back in an era where massive defense, 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 the 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 Jacque Chirac and, and Tony Blair in Saint 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.

And 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 it. We, there 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, 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 where, what we have at NATO is just a large collection of countries that basically operate as if they're all from different continents. And there's, it's a real problem.

And so that's why I think this, this summit has not begun to reckon with that what happens if you pull the U.S. back from NATO is that there isn't really a European pillar to, to build that doesn't exist yet. And that I think has to be built. So how we got here was, I think the U.S. assuming we were always gonna be in, in Europe, Europeans neglecting their own defense, and Europeans now not working together and we're still not seeing that, I think at the Europe, at the EU level as much as we actually should be seeing.

And there's a lot of res, 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, quite effectively.

Minna Ålander: If I may just add some sort of like, maybe a little bit more psychological aspects to it. So 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, that we had remo, removed the, the eventuality of war from this continent. And, 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, was the main theater in a way that, that completely got removed from the equation in the European imagination. And I'm, I'm talking mostly of course, about like sort of continental western Europe. And, 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, and that's why the Dutch just like 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 like further away and it was sort of like this era of, 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, and you can conduct war somewhere far away. It, it was anyways, like U.S. wars, especially in the Middle East in the 2000s that were sort of like the main issue for, for Europeans to, like, the question was like, do European allies participate in those war or not? And, and it was sort of like, it was sort of voluntary in a way. Like it, it wasn't any kind of, it, it was not the Europeans choice to sort of like go toward their, it was more about alliance, solidarity why then, then like a lot of Europeans opted for like, fighting with America in Afghanistan and, and elsewhere.

So, so this is sort of like. It, it has been a really traumatic and dramatic experience in Europe to realize that that war came back to this continent because everybody assumed that this was a thing of the past. So I think that, that, 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.

Anastasiia Lapatina: 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 the, 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, and choose who is who, who's gonna what, right, and then collaborate.

So can you, can you talk a bit about that? What's the smarter way to go here?

Max Bergmann: And let me just also preface, you know, part of this is a NATO is a huge success story, as is the European Union, at basically resolving all the security dilemmas that prompted 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 to say, okay, countries like Finland are gonna be spending a ton because they're super rightly paranoid about you know, they're 1,300 kilometer border with, 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. You know, Spain and Italy have a larger army than the United Kingdom. So how do you leverage that scale that Europe has with 450 million people, 1.4 million people in uniform to battlefield effects?

And I, 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, you know, in some ways 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.

And that pot of money could be used to re-arm 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, than Italy building a bridge connecting Sicily and Messina in terms of a, a European for, for European defense.

So that, 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 scale by getting countries like Spain and Italy and others to contribute more to the defense of the Baltics, the defense of Finland.

And, and I think you would find real popular support for that. Also, because it probably wouldn't mean that, you know, 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. So thinking about solutions along that line than just saying, let's just beat up on the Spanish because they're not gonna 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 Ålander: So I sort of agree and sort of disagree with this suggestion because like obviously the problem with the solidarity and how to measure solidarity is why we are in the first place in this whole, like, percentage of GDP mess in a way, because that's the easiest way of measuring like the amount of pain it, 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 like 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, they can buy it right now and place those orders without getting into these kind of guns versus butter debates that we talked about in the beginning, but not many other European states can do that.

So the, the, the ability to actually sort of like invest in, in, in the military capabilities is quite like different. And like for example, Finland is under much more fiscal pressure than, than Denmark is, although Finland is in a way closer to the threat. I would say, like obviously there are some reasons for Denmark to feel, to feel more directly threatened recently, and that's in a weird way through this whole like Trump threat to, to Greenland.

I would also say that the, 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, that reaches all the way to the southern Europe as well, so the southern European countries investing in their resilience in terms of like energy infrastructure.

And I, I mean they will have to invest a lot in climate resilience because like more than a thousand people, Spain has experienced more than a 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 than the Russian threat and, and so on. So I think that threats are sort of, many of them unite us all, but we experienced 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 defense, industrial and technological base. That's of course something that can be very interesting for, for countries in the south or like west of Europe as well.

And I think that because we should all consider supporting Ukraine and, and not only supporting Ukraine, but cooperating with Ukraine and integrating Ukraine into European defense arrangements that are emerging now, this should be considered a, 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 like 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 like amounts in absolute terms, like 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, that, that people are announcing huge pots of money. And then we can ask like, does it really make sense that that Germany spends 215 billion on defense? Like, is, is that really necessary?

And also like, I think maybe my final sort of like 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.

Anastasiia Lapatina: I wanna pivot to talking about another column that he wrote recently, Minna, 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 U.K. agreed to coordinate on nuclear responses, and you said that this was so revolutionary that, you know, hell might as well just freeze next, that's the scale that you chose. So, you know, just unpack that, you know, why, why is this such a big deal and, and what it means for European defense. And Max, of course, feel free to jump in as well.

Minna Ålander: So why I consider this so revolutionary is basically that France has until now always refused any kinds of like 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, so this is how important it is for France on the one hand, to enhance Europe's own ability to take care of its defense and, and sort of like take charge of our destiny in a way, in terms of the strategic autonomy.

And, and then this is of course, like a huge step also in the sense that France and U.K., the two European nuclear powers, are showing themselves, are sort of like showcasing this kind of responsiveness to partner’s needs. I mean, obviously Germany is the main, main partner here that is extremely nervous, but obviously Germany's not alone with, with this uncertainty about whether or not the U.S. really is still committed to the extended nuclear deterrent.

So this is very indicative of how Europe is starting to sort of like 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 like somehow try to make the best of and, and how far does that get us? So, 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, and the U.K. simply lack that, the numbers in terms of their arsenal to do that. And also they, they don't have like the same variety of sort of like deals that enable sort of like also tactical nuclear warfare and so on. And, and their doctrines are also more limited in that, in that regard.

So, so there's no sort of like idea that, that France and U.K. even together could ever sort of like completely just replace the offer that the Americans have extended to the Europeans until now. But the point is sort of like to make sure that we think about all these levels from conventional to nuclear. We look at what, what, what's the status quo in, in in Europe and, and what can we do with what we have now to bridge this gap because like we are currently in an extremely vulnerable situation.

And that is mainly thanks to President 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 U.S. troops in, in from Europe and, and other uncertainties that are plaguing the transatlantic alliance right now. So, we in Europe need to, of course, like build up a lot, but because that's inevitably gonna take a couple years, we also need to have a look at what, what can be done faster than that, and what do we have now?

Max Bergmann: Yeah. Maybe just to add, you know sometimes I'm, I, I play the role of grumpy think tanker and say, you know, what's, what's not happening, and, oh my God, this, the, here's this gap and this, this needs to be done. But a lot is happening.

Minna I think is much more levelheaded and, and points to the French U.K. nuclear conversation. The U.K. 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 kind of do more with less money effectively and really focuses U.K. efforts on Europe, less of it, 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 not, has, has spent a lot of money in the past and not gotten a lot for it, but I think there's a, 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 you know, 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 wanna sort of blame Donald Trump for causing this sort of 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 we America was sort of back and that everything would be the way it was. But the U.S. has, you know, 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. So 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, that Russia would continue to mobilize, its, 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 U.S. 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, you know, it's, I think it's 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 for, I think in general for Ukraine. But that is the kind of urgent task that I think Europeans really need to sort of be focusing on in, in the next few years.

Anastasiia Lapatina: I think this is the perfect spot to wrap up before it gets any more doom and gloom.

Minna Ålander: Yeah.

Anastasiia Lapatina: Than already happens in this conversation. Thank you guys, this was really fascinating.

Minna Ålander: Thank you.

Max Bergmann: Thanks so much for having me.

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