On NATO’s shared burdens, Europe is finally starting to pull its weight

It didn’t all start with former President Donald Trump’s foot stomping — Americans have been complaining for decades that they effectively subsidize Europe by assuming an inordinate share of its defense costs.

As early as 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was lamenting that insufficient efforts by U.S. allies meant that the Europeans were close to “making a sucker out of Uncle Sam.” 

On it went for decades, until NATO’s Defense Investment Pledge (which calls for allies to move toward spending 2 percent of GDP on defense by 2024) added a measurable criterion by which to address the challenges caused by moral hazard.  

So bruising and long-lasting is the debate about burden-sharing that it did not take long to rekindle it when transatlantic partners declared aid for Ukraine their new joint project. “Make Europe pay” soon became the new battle cry in the U.S. Congress. Any new appropriation to benefit Ukraine, some argued, should depend on Europe spending an equivalent amount. 

The Europeans have certainly earned this suspicion. But times have also changed, such that checking these long-held beliefs against new information yields surprising results.

According to new data collected by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Europe is now spending more than the United States on Ukraine. In fact, the gap is widening.

One wouldn’t know from the public debate in the U.S., but Ukraine aid is turning into an exemplar for transatlantic burden-sharing. And even on defense, the laggards are finally catching up.  

Data from Stockholm’s International Peace Research Institute shows that, when adjusted for inflation, U.S. military expenditure decreased by 11.5 percent between 2010 and 2022, while the combined defense spending of European NATO members increased by 18.1 percent. As a result, the burden sharing gap within NATO shrank significantly. No longer does the U.S. account for three quarters of the alliance’s defense spending — it is now a bit more than two-thirds. This gap, while still too wide, is likely to narrow further.

In fact, in Vilnius, NATO revised the defense pledge to spend “at least 2 percent” of GDP on defense, recognizing that Europeans are ready to do more. Still, the allies are unlikely to converge entirely, given the different nature of their respective global ambitions.  

Although only seven NATO member states spent 2 percent or more of their GDP on defense in 2022, that number is expected to reach 19 by next year and 24 by 2026. In other words, three quarters of the alliance will be in compliance with the rule in less than three years. Only three countries — Canada, Iceland, and Luxembourg — still lack a plan to reach the 2 percent mark.  

While getting to a fairer distribution of responsibilities within NATO has been a rocky ride, burden sharing on Ukraine is another story. The Kiel’s July data shows that between February 2022 and May 2023, European countries actually committed more aid to Ukraine than the United States did during 11 of the 17 months included in the data.

And this trend is accelerating. The U.S., which had contributed more than 52 percent of all Ukraine aid up to last December, is now at 43 percent, below Europe’s 49 percent. 

Of course, the nature of allies’ support varied greatly, but such asymmetry is not only fair, it is also more efficient. The U.S. provides for the majority of Ukraine’s military needs because it is better equipped to do so. But Europe has provided Ukraine with nearly two-thirds of all humanitarian aid. The EU notably reallocated 17 billion euros from its cohesion fund to help member states welcome millions of refugees. The U.S., an Atlantic away, could not possibly have been an equal partner here.

European countries have also provided the majority of the budgetary support to the government in Kyiv, having set aside 18 billion euros in particular last December to cover Ukraine’s macro-financial needs in 2023. 

As reconstruction draws closer, the nature of what the transatlantic community deems fair burden-sharing will evolve. Ukraine’s aspirations are intrinsically European and geared toward EU membership. In fact, the EU could pronounce itself on launching Ukraine’s EU accession negotiations by the end of 2023. A fair share of the burden would see the EU gradually take on more of the transformation bill of its future member state. 

Recent events provide grounds for optimism. On June 20, the European Commission proposed to create a new “Ukraine Facility,” which would allocate 50 billion euros between 2024 and 2027 to help rebuild the country, thus providing predictability and a financial “floor” for the Ukrainian government. Joseph Borrel, the EU’s foreign policy chief, also announced that he wishes to add 20 billion euros to support Ukraine militarily through 2027. 

Despite recurring concerns that Western unity would not last, both the U.S. and Europe have maintained their efforts over time. And they have indeed shared this burden equitably. 

If the U.S. and Europe can learn to address the growing suite of modern challenges jointly and accept reasonable, logical, and limited asymmetries — that Europe will do more to help rebuild Ukraine, given the country’s membership aspirations, and that America will do more on defense given its global role — burden sharing can still turn into a transatlantic success story. 

Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff is a Guido Goldman Distinguished Scholar for Geostrategy and James Sallembien a Research and Program Assistant, both at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.