Passing the Buck Back to Our Allies

Justin Logan

In my 2023 paper, “Uncle Sucker,” I lamented the failure of US efforts to shift the burdens of defense back onto the shoulders of US allies and client states. During the Cold War, Congress required presidential administrations to produce a report on “Allied Contributions to the Common Defense.”

In that report, as former Pentagon official Richard Perle would later admit, US officials would portray allied defense efforts in the most favorable possible light to protect them from political pressure in the United States to lessen the American commitment to their defense. In Perle’s words, he was always “thinking of ways to put the best possible gloss on some pretty dismal figures … we look for statistics that make the allies look good.”

Although the report was ineffective at shifting defense burdens, it performed the service of making administration officials uncomfortable while they played Robert Shapiro to the allies’ OJ.

Utah Senator Mike Lee has introduced a couple of new bills that should interest readers. The “NATO Burden Sharing Report Act” expresses the sense of Congress that “the United States should not continue to shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden for European security.”

That bill reinstates an amped-up version of the Allied Contributions to the Common Defense report, stipulating that such a report should include figures on defense spending, defense spending as a percentage of GDP, contributions to Ukraine’s defense, a look at the countries’ defense-industrial bases, plus the size, structure, and independence of the countries’ militaries.

Lee also introduced a more general “Allied Burden Sharing Report Act” that includes countries outside Europe, examining many of the same issues. Rep. Warren Davidson, who spoke at Cato on NATO last week, has spearheaded a similar effort in the House, getting a provision for an Allied Burdensharing report into the House version of the 2025 NDAA.

With the United States $35 trillion in debt, the programs producing the debt seeming insulated from reforms, and current Congresses throwing another $1.5 trillion on the fire of debt each year, the time has come to twist allies’ arms on their own efforts. They will not like it, and the swampy “transatlantic community” will not like it. But American taxpayers and service members deserve a more serious look at the allies’ contributions to their own defense. It isn’t 1949 anymore.