The limits of the transatlantic order

German Chancellor Angela Merkel paid a visit to the US in recent days. Besides Trump's decision to review the trade agreement that was about to be concluded in the Obama era, the meeting of the two leaders was also awaited with curiosity because of the debates carried out over NATO, the defense organization of the Transatlantic world.

As will be recalled, during his election campaign US President Trump had declared that NATO was a great burden on US finances, that the US was not getting a return on its financial investment in the organization, and that if he took office he would review relations with NATO.

To be sure, after taking the presidential seat he said some things to the effect that before becoming president he had not sufficiently understood the importance of NATO, but he never gave up the thesis that, within NATO, especially the EU member countries must also contribute to defense spending.

Trump's statements in this vein, threatening the Transatlantic order, caused discomfort both among the European partners and in the military bureaucracy in the US. For this organization was both a symbol of the intra-Western relations built after World War II and one of its three legs, perhaps the most important.

Let us recall that NATO's first Secretary General, Lord Hasting Ismays, explained the organization's reason for being as keeping "the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down." In line with this "principle," the US positioned itself in Europe throughout the Cold War. After the end of the Cold War too, the former Eastern Bloc countries were made members of NATO and Russia was in some way sought to be encircled.

As one of the most important elements of the established order, a large number of US soldiers were stationed in Germany within the scope of NATO duties or bilateral agreements. Although this figure has varied from World War II to the present, it currently stands at over thirty thousand. The interesting part is that Germany ranks second in the world, after Japan, in the number of US soldiers on its territory.

That the US, which single-handedly carried out Japan's political, social, military and economic reconstruction after World War II, still keeps such a serious number of soldiers in Japan today seems to reflect a search to keep this country under control in some way. For Japan, whose military spending had fallen to almost zero, experienced a tremendous economic leap beginning in the 1960s, and the US economy had been unable to answer Japan's challenge. In this atmosphere the US's reining in of Japan had taken place mostly at the political level.

We said that defense spending forms an important dimension of the tension between Germany and the US. The German economy, which according to 2016 data spends 1.19% of its gross domestic product on defense, has grown large enough to keep Europe under control.

On the other hand, the influence on the European continent of the US, which still devotes quite serious resources to Europe's defense and ranks first by devoting 3.61% of its gross domestic product to defense spending, is diminishing by the day. Trump's discomfort is quite clear: "We are paying almost all of the defense costs of European countries, Germany included, while the Germans, with this comfort, channel the resources they would spend on defense into the economy and obtain a dominant role in Europe. There is something wrong here."

According to Trump, the wrong can be remedied by Germany giving more support to NATO spending. In this framework, there is no need to point out that the more than thirty thousand US soldiers still in Germany remind it of the political position it should be in.

Indeed, in the talks between Merkel and Trump, the commitment that Germany's defense spending would be raised to 1.3% of gross domestic product was noteworthy. Likewise, under Trump's pressure, the German leader's speaking of the inadequacy of the nuclear agreement with Iran, of which she was one of the architects, was as tragicomic as it was significant in revealing the level of rationality of the relations.

The aim was to get through the meeting without incident, and this has been got through for now. But both French President Macron and German Chancellor Merkel returned empty-handed from the White House; differences of opinion could not be resolved. In other words, the "policy of appeasing Trump" does not appear to have ended successfully.

But it is evident that the limits of the Transatlantic order have eroded considerably. If Trump or the European partners want to save NATO, they have to take up its institutional structure from scratch. Of course in doing so they must also rebuild the organization's credibility. For the members of the organization saw no harm in giving every kind of help to the terrorist organizations that Turkey, their ally in this organization, is fighting. It is quite hard for NATO to save itself in this atmosphere of trust, after all... We will wait and see.