NYT: If Europe wants to save NATO, it’s doing all the wrong things

European members have underspent on their armed forces in the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and their military readiness as a result has tanked. Britain has a small fraction of the warships it had then. Germany went decades ignoring NATO’s spending target of 2 percent of G.D.P. and has fewer than 200,000 active-duty service members, compared with America’s 1.3 million. A few frontline states such as Poland and Finland have militaries capable of going toe-to-toe with Russia, but none can replace American capabilities, including airlifts, air-to-air refueling, battlefield intelligence and the ability to precisely strike targets deep in enemy territory, New York Times writes.

Since The Hague, most NATO members are spending more on their militaries, most importantly Germany, which is on track to get to 5 percent of G.D.P. before the agreement’s 2035 deadline. For the United States to safely shift its attention and resources to deter China’s mounting ambitions in Asia, as Mr. Trump and all his recent predecessors have tried to do, the Europeans will need to buy the right equipment and coordinate better.

“If you imagine a potluck dinner where everybody gets to choose what they bring,” said Julie Smith, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, “everybody will bring the paper plates and a bag of chips, while the Americans still end up bringing the steak.”

Efforts to build a joint European fighter jet fell apart in June amid French and German squabbling over who would reap the biggest economic benefits. France has not joined the largest air defense collaboration, among more than 20 European NATO countries, preferring to build its own technology. The need to coordinate is only more urgent as the priorities of warfare are changing.

Mr. Trump continues to give NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, plenty of material to work with. Within days of ousting the Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro last January, the president mused anew about taking Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, a founding NATO member. Over the following weeks, the alliance nearly fractured as European countries sent small defensive detachments to the island and Trump officials upped their threats. Mr. Rutte again saved the day, getting Mr. Trump to back down at the January economic forum in Davos, by pushing a NATO-led collaboration known as Arctic Sentry.

“We would not have solved the Greenland crisis,” said the Democratic senator Chris Coons, “if Rutte had not positioned himself to be an offramp.”

Yet even faced with the prospect of an American drawdown, European leaders still struggle to overcome decades of favoritism for their chosen military contractors and centuries of suspicion that continental cooperation is just a stalking horse for French or German domination.

The Ankara summit could go very wrong. Mr. Trump is hugely unpopular in Europe, giving leaders such as the leftist Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and the right-wing Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, reasons to pick a fight. Mr. Rutte has planned a deliberately short summit with short meetings and a short joint statement at the end.

He will also maintain his trademark — and often inexplicable — optimism. Asked during an impromptu conversation at NATO headquarters in mid-June how the effort to save NATO was going, Mr. Rutte responded, “I was never worried about NATO. It’s there, so strong, the alliance.” Few in Ankara will agree. As the mistrust and squabbling continue, the problem is no longer just whether America will be a good ally to Europe. It’s whether Europeans can be good allies for themselves.

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