Robert D. Kaplan
In a prophetic speech delivered in Brussels in June 2011, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned Washington’s European allies that if they did not start paying substantially more for their own security, NATO might one day be a thing of the past. Gates noted that he was only “the latest in a string of U.S. defense secretaries who have urged allies privately and publicly, often with exasperation, to meet agreed-upon NATO benchmarks for defense spending.”
At the time, only five of the 28 members of NATO—Albania, Britain, France, Greece, and the United States—were spending at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense annually, as they had pledged to do in 2006. Unless that situation changed dramatically, Gates said, there would be a “dwindling appetite” to defend Europe among the “American body politic writ large.”
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