Despite endless searches for a new mission to justify its massive burden on U.S. taxpayers, NATO has failed to be of much use since then.
Yet NATO members’ defense budgets don’t reflect a real sense of danger from Russia or anyone else. Among the twenty-nine members, only the United States is really serious about its Article 3 obligations to defend itself, spending approximately $700 billion or 3.5 percent of its GDP on defense. No other NATO member comes close to this proportion, and the vast majority fail even to meet the modest, self-imposed requirement to devote at least 2 percent of GDP to defense.
