Are you effing kidding me?
Take a glance at NATO’s defense spending statistics, and Denmark looks like a mediocre member. Last year, the Scandinavian country spent 1.17 percent of GDP on defense, far below NATO’s 2-percent benchmark. But a closer look at the country’s military deployments reveals a rather different picture: Denmark is, in fact, a NATO starlet. Members’ contributions to alliance missions matter as much as their defense spending. We should encourage them to be more like Denmark.
Here we go again. If all this article is designed to do is to encourage spending and activity, that's great. Greece meets the alliance spending goal but isn't exactly a strong alliance participant because their spending is actually directed at nominal NATO ally Turkey.
But some want to be able to count activity in place of defense spending. This is insane. And if this article is part of that nonsense, the stupidity just won't die.
Of freaking course alliance members are expected to contribute to common defense by participating in alliance actions. And Denmark's willingness to do that is great. Kudos, really.
But the NATO 2% spending goal is--open up the Duh Files for this one--a spending goal and not a combined Alliance Goodness Scale. If we could focus on minimum defense capabilities, great. But we can't so spending minimums are necessary to define.
As if defense spending is irrelevant to being able to participate effectively in NATO missions!
Are we to consider geography to give Portugal and Belgium monetary credit for being safely behind the lines while requiring Estonia, Latvia, and Norway to pony up a lot more in spending because they border Russia and require more help? (Although countries like that should be for their own self interest higher spenders than Portugal or Belgium, regardless of alliance goals.)
Being prepared to carry out collective defense as part of NATO through minimally adequate spending levels is a separate issue from contributing to collective defense missions and should not be conflated.
So stop that talk of substituting activity for defense spending. It's a really stupid argument and anyone making it should be embarrassed.
