The phrase "defensive alliance" is ambiguous. The rival meanings are not inherently incompatible. But in practise they tend in opposite directions. When the ambiguity is resolved some-one feels cheated.
To see the problem picture four countries, Timidland, Moralland, Weakland, and Aggroland. Timidland is spending more on defence than it wants to because it fears being attacked by Aggroland. Moralland is also spending more than it wants to on defence because it too fears attack by Aggroland. But the internal politics of Moralland are complicated. The moral thing to do is to build a larger army, attack Aggroland and liberate the people of Aggroland from the tyranny of the Chief Aggro. Or is that the moral thing to do? Isn't war bad?
Timidland and Moralland form an alliance. It is a "defensive alliance" meaning that Timidland will come to Moralland's aid if Aggroland attacks Moralland. But the people of Timidland are aware of the complicated internal politics of Moralland and it is explicit that if Moralland attacks Aggroland, then Moralland is on its own. Even instigating voids the alliance.
The problem arises because history isn't that neat. The 1914-1918 war starts with the Austro-Hungarian Empire giving an ultimatum to Serbia, Russia comes to Serbia's aid, Germany comes to Austria's aid, France and Britain have alliances to honour and end up fighting. If we want political theory to relate to the real world, we need to think about Moralland extending guarantees to Weakland.
Aggroland invades Weakland. Moralland supplies weapons to Weakland. And advisers. Eventually troops. Moralland artillery is shelling Aggroland invaders on Weakland soil from positions in Moralland. Counter battery fire from Aggrotroops in Weakland is hitting positions in Moralland. Does this trigger the defensive alliance and suck Timidland into the war?
Some Timidians argue that they never agreed to give guarantees to Weakland. Given the complicated history of the region, they would have refused to get involved if they had been asked. Others are saying that Moralland are the good guys. Of course Timidland must join the war. What use is a defensive alliance is you don't defend your allies? Peaceful Timidians feel that they have been out manoeuvred, and are being forced to honour guarantees to Weakland that they never made.
If Timidland is pulled into the war by the chains of the alliance, we can be more specific than calling it a defensive alliance. It was a "chaining alliance".
But what should we call a non-chaining alliance? I've picked the word "isolating". That is clearly wrong in theory. The terms of the alliance don't forbid Moralland from extending security guarantees to Weakland, they merely classify that as instigating; Moralland cannot call upon Timidland to help honour the guarantee.
But theory and practice disagree. The internal politics of Moralland has its guns-before-butter faction. They saw the alliance as a matter of building military strength, with a view to regime change in Aggroland, to save the world from the danger presented by the Chief Aggro. Moralland also has a butter-before-guns faction, that see the alliance as an opportunity to economise on defence spending, freeing up money for schools, hospitals, road, pensions, police, industrial policy, the climate emergency, tax cuts,... The list is endless. We see the likely outcome in Europe. NATO agrees that all members should spend at least 2% of GDP on defence. Most don't. The other priorities take precedence. In practice the non-chaining alliance leads to Moralland cutting defence spending. They are after all moral and pensioners deserve higher pensions, etc. The guns-before-butter faction are aghast to find that they have been out manoeuvred. They nearly had the army that they needed to protect Weakland from Aggroland. The alliance with Timidland was supposed to add to the army. In practise it subtracted. Moralland's own army has shrunk and Timidland's army is not available. The isolating alliance has left them isolated, unable to offer security guarantees to Weakland.
Obviously my fine distinction has contemporary resonances, but after World War Three reduces Europe and America to radioactive rubble, the run up to World War Four will involve China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia. Will they continue the tradition of talking about defensive alliances? Or will they embrace the distinction between chaining alliances and isolating alliances? I locate this essay in the British tradition of analytic philosophy, looking at words and attempting to resolve their ambiguities. Not all ambiguities; just those with large consequences.
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Notes -
Let's look at it from another angle. Why is NATO so obsessed with the 2% of GDP figure?
Never in human history has a country lost a war to an abstract ratio. They lose to brigades, warships and aircraft. Why is it that NATO insists on a budgetary commitment when what they need is a target for strength? They need to work out how many brigades are needed, how many reservists, submarines and so on to meet their needs.
When you actually look at the ratio of strength, you see that even European NATO alone is not threatened by Russia. Europe has more and better of everything except tactical and strategic nukes. The big European countries have fairly large, modern armies and a much larger overall population than Russia. The big countries alone have about 500,000 professional soldiers, ignoring the little ones. That's much more than Russia prewar. It's the same story at sea and in the air, probably even better for Europe there. At least 3:1 advantage for Europe alone, ignoring the US. And they have the advantage of being on the defence. Dean will of course come in with some galaxy-brained reasoning for why the Russian military juggernaut is really so much more powerful than the decadent NATO pigs, despite also being a pale shadow of its former glory and losing Putin's idiotic war in Ukraine - the worst strategic disaster for Russia since 1941. But for those of us who live in the real world where Ukraine is much weaker than the entirety of Europe, it stands to reason that Europe can defend itself from Russia.
Thus there is no defensive rationale in further conventional militarization. They could not lose to Russia in a conventional war, not if they were prepared to station forces in the Baltics. Given modern satellite surveillance they should be able to foresee a Russian invasion of the Baltics and move forces there to defend them. They should already have forces there if they want to defend them (and they do to some extent). Why offer NATO membership to the Baltics? It's strategically ridiculous, those countries have negligible military potential and bad geography. But if you look at it from the point of view of Lockheed and BAE, it's genius. They can create threatening stories about the Suwalki gap and sell more hardware. Diplomats and statesmen can feel important, prestigious and patriotic standing up to Russia.
Problems arise if Russia goes nuclear, since that's the one place Russia does have advantages. Given their conventional weakness, it makes sense to go nuclear, that's the TLDR of escalate-to-deescalate. They have something like 10:1 in tactical nukes against all of NATO and a large, modern strategic force. Britain and France can still get their warheads off and destroy much of Russia. The US can destroy all of Russia. But why would Britain and France accept megadeaths to ensure that Poland or Lithuania are immolated rather than having to bend over for Russia? It doesn't make much sense but it's possible - Britain has made huge sacrifices for Poland before. They don't even have permissive action links on their nuclear subs, British submarine commanders might execute their own foreign policy.
Why would Putin risk nuclear war with NATO over irrelevant countries like the Baltics, does he even want Poland? The whole scenario is very strange. But if we imagine that Putin is this evil megalomaniacal conqueror, what Europe needs is H-bombs. Tactical and strategic nukes would actually ward off Russia. We can have little doubt that Poland doesn't want to bend over for Russia and would use nuclear weapons to defend themselves.
Who doesn't want European nuclearization? The US and Russia. Nuclearization increases European strategic autonomy, it lessens US influence in Europe. It means that Europeans won't buy overpriced US hardware to suck up to America, that they won't feel the need to show up to wars that don't help them. It means that other countries around the world will nuclearize and lessen US strategic flexibility.
Who wants Ukraine to be in NATO? It has very little defensive utility. The Ukrainian military adds more mass to NATOs but NATO has plenty of mass already. It pushes Russia in the Black Sea. It puts NATO missiles closer to Russia. It raises tensions dramatically, Putin repeatedly warned this was a red line. Nobody's security is enhanced, least of all Ukraine's. But it does sell a lot of weapons!
The mainstream argument seems to be 'Europe needs to produce more weapons to give to Ukraine so they can fight Russia'. But why? Why does Ukraine fighting Russia advance European interests? It hurts European interests, Russia is Europe's natural energy supplier. It would be silly for Europe to attack Azerbaijan for assaulting Armenia or to fight America over Iraq's independence. Don't join wars that don't advance your interests. But when the experts have a chance at lucrative spots on the board of Raytheon, when the decisionmakers want to look strong and patriotic...
Having a much larger military can be necessary to decisively win an asymmetrical war. Say Iran started lobbing ICBMs into NATO capitals. You can lob ICBMs back with little difficulty, but that might not actually get them to stop, maybe they're happy to take lots of losses if it means they can hurt the Western devils. If NATO actually wants to protect as many of its citizens as possible, they'll need to actually invade Iran in that scenario. And that'll take a very large military to win an offensive intercontinental war with a regional power.
Being able to define winning asymmetrically also helps. Israel isn't interested in destroying Tehran for the sake of it, and having the military capacity to send a terrifying signal is enough to force the other party to stand down. Dropping a single strike on Isfahan in retaliation for a (poorly executed saturation/wasteful show of force) missile salvo demonstrates capability while offering mutual outs: the jew can only hit us once, the persian can be hit where it actually matters. Large standing armies are signals, discouraging belligerents by the threat of actionable retaliation. This doesn't quite work when the other parties have warped risk/reward payoff structures, but it at least minimizes enough threats.
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That's not a practical scenario, it takes far too long for forces to get there no matter how large NATO armies are. You'd have to bring them down through Turkey, through all the mountains, get shipping and supplies. Look how long it took the US to get set up for the Iraq War. The geography of Iran is hellish for an invasion.
Missiles move in minutes, militaries need months.
The correct response to Iran firing nuclear missiles at Europe is to fire nukes back, not invade the country. Or if they fire conventional missiles, just fire conventional missiles back. It's not like they can do much damage with conventional warheads.
And IRL Iran is pretty careful and rational. They resist the urge to launch massive attacks at Western countries, Israel excepted. Even when the US assassinated Soleimani they only shelled some US bases.
I meant a non-nuclear ICBM. Or any other sort of explosive strike that kills hundreds that's very difficult to defend against.
This would be such a massive waste of money the west would internally consider it a win. Not even the US can afford to use ICBMs in this manner.
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Army counts and number of warships/aircraft, etc. can all be gamed quite easily. It's harder to game total investment numbers. It can sort of be gamed through inflated pensions qualifying as "military investment", but there's another bit in the NATO records about a certain % being devoted to procurement, which takes care of that. On the issue of overinvestment, the 1% to 1.5% most NATO countries were at prior to the invasion would have been enough to have a basic territorial defense, but it wouldn't have been enough for a serious expeditionary force if Russia tried to do a fait accompli invasion of the Baltics. Germany's military in particular was just in a disastrous state before the war that it would have been more of a liability than an asset.
We had this yet most people (barring the US government) missed the invasion of Ukraine. Also, there would be a lot of pushback to moving a bunch of troops close to Russia from domestic far right + far left who are obsessed with not "provoking" Russia.
For the same reason that the UK + France guaranteed Poland in 1939. Russia's history has been dominated with a desire to push west as far as possible. Putin has only reaffirmed that.
Has this changed?
Well, the Germans are allegedly relooking conscription, so there is the prospect of light and motorized infantry.
Yea, the Federal Minister of Defense has made a proposal to that point, but I wouldn't count on it going anywhere. I's the kind of thing that gets shot down regularly.
So far there have been no tangible, substantial changes that I am aware of. 100 billion € were provided to the military as a special fund, but I'm not aware of anything that would have come of it. Given our MoD's reputation for rampant grift and wastefulness, money alone will probably not fix anything.
I'd agree on conscription passing as a standing policy per see, but I wouldn't be surprised if the infrastructure behind it is renovated.
Nor, frankly, would I be surprised if in the next few years Germany and a number of other European countries look to the migrant population as a potential military manpower fix, in a service-for-residence sort of way. There is increasing reporting that Russia is turning towards not only trying to solicit foreign volunteers on the basis of promising jobs, but coercing foreign students and workers in Russia to fight by threatening to not extend visas and such.
For Russia, that's eating the seed-corn for what the normal purpose of such study programs are for (to educate and shape a more sympathetic technical/potential future elites) by deterring as high-class potential visitors, but for Europe deterring illegal migrants would be a domestic political win in and of itself.
Forgive the hour-long video, but Perun did a video on the institutional challenges facing the hundred billion fund two years ago, which is always good if you want to be depressed.
I wish I shared your optimism on migrant populations fitness for service. Absent domestic security considerations of training foederati, the migrant populations are by their own definition unfit for purpose, and in practiced reality require extensive secondary training to reach baseline competency. PT, basic drill, chain of command... its quite a shit experience trying to get normies to do that, let alone uncooperative aliens. Don't even start considering battle drills, I wouldn't trust these guys to inventory shit properly.
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Which means that there are more potential sources of loose nukes for remnant Da'eshbags or other deranged cultists to get their hands on.
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Because Russia is stupid and instead extracting piles of money from being energy supplier they decided to wage short victorious war.
Because ruling class and society in general there was unable to accept its loss of superpower status.
For other European countries it is preferable for this adventure to go badly for Russia so they will not try it with NATO countries next time.
Because otherwise Russia will invade, it it can get away with it or thinks it can get away with it?
Coordination tool.
Assuming no coordination issues.
This is a big assumption.
Maybe I missed something, but if anyone is losing this war right now it is Ukraine (it was still idiotic war and bad for Russia)
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Because this is a textbook coordination problem. If NATO didn’t demand 2%, which European nations would spend even as much as they do?
No one involved has perfect information. Russia in particular has demonstrated that it will pick fights even when it can’t ensure a quick victory. That means conventional buildup (or modernization) has value.
You’re absolutely correct that the U.S. benefits from a powerful NATO. Isn’t that the point of a treaty?
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