Trump’s NATO heresy was Eisenhower’s wisdom: James Robbins

“There is no reason for the American taxpayers, in the face of our own substantial deficit, to continue to subsidize Germany, France, England, Norway, Belgium and other prosperous European democracies.” Is that Donald Trump going off again about NATO? Will Hillary Clinton smack him down for his reckless rhetoric? Are we on the brink of an international crisis?

Oh wait, it was uber-liberal Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., in 1994, talking about a NATO burden-sharing amendment to the defense authorization act. He wanted to start pulling troops out of Europe unless our allies paid more to keep them there.

OK, well how about someone saying that unless European allies started spending more on capability and work out cooperation with NATO, the alliance could become “arelic of history”? That undiplomatic, irresponsible comment had to be Trump, right? No, it was President Bill Clinton’s secretary of Defense, William Cohen, fulminating at a NATO meeting in 2000.

This one just has to be Trump: “Turkey even gets to renegotiate (NATO) base rights every year. I don’t know what genius negotiated that deal, but every year we give Turkey the option to shoot at our feet and say, ‘Tap-dance, Uncle Sam!’ … As long as (our NATO allies) can get one more bite out of the apple, nobody is going to voluntarily say, ‘We will pay more money.’ ” Hillary Clinton would jump on that comment, calling it uncouth, destructive and careless. Oh but sorry, it was Colorado member of Congress and feminist icon Patricia Schroeder criticizing NATO way back in 1988.

Politicians have been getting upset over NATO burden-sharing for a long time, at least since President Eisenhower fumed over the Europeans “making a sucker out of Uncle Sam.” Trump is just the latest public figure to say the free-riders need to pay their freight.

Trump’s insistence that our NATO partners pay their bills or else has generated an overheated response. Clinton’s campaign frets that Trump’s position is an attack on the integrity of the alliance itself. Former secretary of State Madeleine Albright fulminated about Trump’s “irresponsible” comments, accusing him of “blackmailing our partners.”

But back in 1997, Secretary Albright told Congress that she’d “insist that our old allies share this burden fairly. That’s what NATO is all about.” She must not have insisted very hard because a study group she chaired in 2010 found that “the primary limiting factor hindering (NATO) military transformation has been the lack of European defense spending and investment.”

That same year, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates discussed the “NATO budgetary crisis” and noted how few allies are meeting their defense spending targets. He said this could create “real or perceived weakness” that would be “a temptation to miscalculation and aggression.” In other words, the threat to peace and stability isn’t Trump’s irresponsible rhetoric; it is Europe’s irresponsibly low defense spending.

NATO “doesn’t fund itself. Just come with me to my constituencies and ask them whether or not we should primarily fund it.” Vice President Biden made this veiled threat at a NATO summit in 2015. He added that “every NATO country needs to meet its commitment to devote 2% of its GDP to defense.” But only five of the 28 NATO countries clear this bar — Estonia, Greece, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States. And U.S. outlays cover $650 billion of the $900 billion spent by NATO’s member nations on their military budgets, or 72%.

Not only is Trump right on the facts, his more forceful tone also might be the tonic needed to shake the other 23 countries out of their complacency and meet their obligations. The only difference between Trump’s approach to NATO burden-sharing and those of his predecessors is that he might finally get our allies to pony up.

James S. Robbins writes weekly for USA TODAY and is the author of    This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive.