Recent events have convinced me that I was at least partly wrong about my previous view of the United States having bases all around the world. Europeans love to complain about America, but when Trump threatened to pull out of NATO, in the face of an ascendant Russia, the European reaction certainly wasn’t “don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” Likewise in Asia, while the Taiwanese and Japanese have always been warm to American military support, the growing power of China has definitely sparked discussions about America’s continued commitment to obligations in that region.
Germany is also no longer the front to the communist block - which no longer exists and only Russia is left as direct opponent. So it may make sense to have NATO defense moving east. Many Germans think that the US politics against Russia leads to nothing good.
What Trump does/says is fully inconsistent. NATo is obsolete. Then it is great. He wants to reduce military. Then record money flows into the military. He wants to get out of Iraq, then he blackmails Iraq to let the US stay. He uses kurds to fight against ISIS and then he hands them over to Assad...
The main political reaction in Germany to him is to have not too much changed and hope for a more rational US government.
It is her contractual obligation. Currently Germany does not have an Army anymore but a museum. How many tanks are operational? 100? Russia has 10.000...
Tanks? Not sure that this is our biggest concern right now.
You are disingenuously arguing against the wind.
Yes, there is, a kind of contract.
When nations agree to targets, and they did a long time ago, its material. That it's not technically part of the treaty is relevant, but not so important.
The 2% target was established long ago, there's a renewed 'agreement' since Trump took office, but it's along the same lines: European states will wait for Trump to be out of office and then ignore it.
The fact remains America provides defence for Europe, and Europe is willing to let that happen because, well, it's very expensive, among other things.
Which are in the future. The target is for 2025.
> remains America provides defence for Europe
The fact remains that NATO is not an US security organization where other Nations buy protection. Trump may think that, since he knows the Mafia from his real-estate business.
Nobody has asked German citizens yet, if we want to invest 2% of the GDP into defense and where it should be invested.
Basically a military & governments have decided that for us, which is entirely undemocratic and a fully un-controlled process.
It's great that the military-industrial complex can on its own decide how much to spend, without any outside interference. This leads to a situation, like in the US where roughly a trillion USD is spend on military, which is an insane amount of money.
Yes, Indeed. tanks are not the biggest problem. https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/21/pepe-escobar-you-say-y...
PS: "Germany is only one of 19 NATO members that have not met the 2% GDP spending goal set at the 2014 NATO summit in Wales."
PS. : the spending goal is in the future: 2025. It‘s also a political goal, not a contract.
And the current data can be seen here:
https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/pdf_2019_...
Look at the numbers, they are vastly different from what you claim.
They are "vastly different" because most countries don't share their fair burden. Trump may be wrong in many things, here he is right.
In the PDF you provided "NATO guideline 2%" But hey, why spent it on the military? Let the US spent/fight for us.
Everything of that is wrong, There is no contract. The goal of 2% is set for 2025, not now. Currently a bunch of countries spend less than 2%.
And: large parts of the US military spending is completely unrelated to NATO.
Next you need to ask yourself if these approximate numbers make sense:
Europe minus Russia, without the US: defense spending of 350 billion USD. NATO has defense spending of 950 billion dollar. Russia: defense spending: 65 billion USD.
Europe is already outspending Russia five times. NATO is outspending Russia by 15 times.
This looks like lack of money is not the actual problem NATO has.
The same is true for Military spending. The military is labor heavy, and production is mostly domestic. If you don’t adjust for purchasing power, you’re comparing apples and oranges: https://warontherocks.com/2019/12/why-russian-military-expen...
> Perhaps most importantly, the more methodologically sound approach to comparing defense spending based on PPP illustrates that the gap between U.S. expenditure on the one hand and that of Russia and China on the other has closed dramatically over the past 15 years. Today, when taken together, spending by Russia and China is roughly equal to U.S. defense expenditure, with Russia representing a much larger share than previously recognized.
Moreover, even PPP probably doesn’t accurately depict the difference. Beijing spends about a billion dollars a year to operate a subway serving a city of 20 million people. New York spends ten times as much for a system half the length and half the ridership. Moscow spends 1/7 as much as New York to operate a larger system with more ridership.
Military expenditures probably scale much closer to something like a subway system than the overall PPP basket of goods. In that case, we are probably looking at less than a factor of two advantage in what that spending actually buys.
Russia is decades behind in high-tech and has only limited access to western technology in many areas. The country largely lives of selling natural resources. There is a many years ongoing embargo on high-tech in many areas - also from the EU. There is basically limited technological cooperation with Russia in many high-tech sectors right now.
The result is that Russia has only a few somewhat competitive areas in military technology and needs to invest a lot of money into those: Nuclear weapons, rockets, space technology, etc. Selling those weapons helps their industry a bit.
This affects for example how much money they have to deploy even tanks:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22600/russia-cant-affo...
For example they have only a single old aircraft carrier:
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-admiral-kuznetsov-murmansk-f...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmUpZDb3W0Q
The US OTOH has none or ten whole carrier fleets...
Russia has submarines and a lot of nuclear technology. From time to time an old one sinks. The older ones are rotting somewhere...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48897468
That Russia has cheap clothes for their soldiers, or can mass produce tanks for their soldiers does not help them, if they don't have a competitive high-tech industry. Keeping the nuclear weapons (rockets, submarines, launchers, spy satellites, ...) is extremely expensive and where the money goes.
For the West it's much easier to cooperate on technology and weapons.
See the list of carriers: most of them are from US, NATO or allies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_in_s...
It's clear that 65 billions USD doesn't buy much on the world market, even though the costs at home are low. The rest of the economy does not support their high-tech needs...
It's not that Russia has no competitive weapons, but the breadth and depth is simply not there. Russia selectively chooses areas where they develop competitive weapons with their more limited resources.
True, the Russians don't reveal the full scale of military costs. But the US does the same:
https://www.thenation.com/article/tom-dispatch-america-defen...
Much is for the US and their military adventures, not for NATO or NATO-related things. It supports the US war machine. Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, North Africa, ... Much of that has nothing to do with defending Germany, defending the US or defending NATO...
The US and its allies/friendly countries currently outspend Russia approximitely fifteen times.
If Germany would spend 2% of its GPP on military, then it would approach Russia in absolute numbers, That would be crazy.
What we really need is LESS military spending and less military adventures of the US (Iraq, Syrian, Libya, ...). The US has destabilized the whole middle east and north africa. The refugees are going to Europe, not the US...
The US will stay in south germany for the near future, because it provides excellent logistics for US wars in middle east, asia and africa.