Most other NATO members are no better. Canada, for instance, spends just 1.27 percent of its gross domestic product on defense (the NATO target is 2 percent) and cannot meet its obligations to defend North America’s airspace. When Justin Trudeau was overheard at the summit belittling Trump for taking too long with his press conference, the Canadian prime minister sounded to many Americans like a child whining that a working parent had kept him waiting for supper.
All of this means that when Macron and other European leaders muse about creating an autonomous European defense force, they are, as one seasoned Parisian observer put it to me, “playing with cards they don’t have.” Even sizable increases in defense spending wouldn’t fill the gap that an American departure from Europe would leave: Roughly half of European defense spending goes to salaries and pensions, not warfighting capacity.
This is worse than brain death. It’s a philosophical failure, the result of a long-term attenuation in the idea of an Atlantic community — the West — united not only by a shared history or common enemies, but also by a unifying set of ethical and political ideals, and the sense that those ideals entwine our destinies.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member