Member Newsletter
Everyone is publishing their bills of particulars about all the horrible things Donald Trump will do if he becomes president again. That’s become even easier with Time magazine’s publication today of a lengthy interview with Trump in which he expands on the list and provides quotes that make them more specific. (Get ready for your pregnancy ankle bracelet and fetal monitor if you get pregnant in a red state.) But there’s one item on these litanies that’s not really correct. And we should understand what it actually means more clearly.
The line is usually that Trump won’t defend allies if they’re not “paying up” on their defense spending. But this is wrong. It makes no sense. Donald Trump couldn’t care less about how much Germany or Japan or South Korea is spending on their defense budget. Really it doesn’t have anything to do with anything. NATO members paying 2% of GDP doesn’t put money in the U.S. Treasury and it doesn’t meaningfully reduce pressure on the U.S. defense budget. It probably strengthens NATO. And that’s a good thing. But at the scale we’re talking about it has no real impact on U.S. spending. And Trump isn’t trying to reduce aggregate U.S. spending on defense anyway. Ten different ways of saying he couldn’t care less.
What part of the man’s internal calculus, this player on the national and the international stage we’ve gotten to know very well, would make this matter to him at all?
The “paying up” has always been about something different. It’s really about playing allies off against potential adversaries as a bid for advantage. This could conceivably be about U.S. national advantage. That’s a very destructive and destabilizing way for a great power to operate in the world. But in concept that’s possible. But that’s certainly never how Donald Trump would operate. The advantage is to him. Personally. That might be monetary or through additions to his power or glory. But we know it’s all about him.
For what it’s worth, this is the thing that worries me most about a second Trump presidency. At least in concept we have some real ability to undo or fix things that get broken or deformed within our society and state. Easier said than done, certainly. But we as a society, as a republic, control most of the levers. Internationally, it’s very different. Once big parts of the global system get broken we can’t easily put them back like they were. We could do that more or less on our own muscle in the 1940s and 1950s. But it’s not the 1950s anymore. Once big wars break out, in addition to the horrific downsides of big wars, you can’t just put things back the way things were.
There’s quite a lot to consider and to fear on this front. But we can start by not parroting the absurd idea that Trump cares about other countries’ defense budgets.