Opinion: Germany is NATO’s biggest freeloader
German Chancellor Angela Merkel greets a member of the Bundeswehr, the German armed forces, on the soldier's birthday, before the arrival of Laotian Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith at the Chancellery in Berlin on March 13. By James Kirchick April 3 at 1:57 PM James Kirchick, a visiting fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, is the author of “The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age.
Well, the Russians are rattling sabers again — and the United States is still needed both to contain an expansionist Moscow and dampen strategic competition among NATO’s European member states. But what about that third member of Ismay’s equation? Germany today is a sterling exemplar of liberal democracy — and a shaky alliance partner.
But now with Vladimir Putin’s Russia threatening the European security order and Germany a vital member of the liberal democratic club, it is not German aggression that anyone seriously fears but its opposite: passivity. At the 2014 NATO summit, Germany joined the rest of its allies in agreeing to spend 2 percent of its gross domestic product on defense by 2024. Five years later, it is nowhere near accomplishing that goal.
In some ways, the 2 percent hurdle is an arbitrary measure of a country’s commitment to mutual defense; Germans have frequently suggested to me that their generous humanitarian aid budget and absorption of more than a million refugees ought to count toward their NATO spending target. But although there may be many metrics for calculating a nation’s contribution to the alliance, the German shortfall doesn’t even begin to capture the dismal condition of its armed forces.
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