A Nationalist Foreign Policy?

Richard Burt

Security, United States

Trump and Cruz are bearers of a harder-edged, more nationalistic conception of foreign policy, focused more on securing American interests than on promoting American values.

Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of the National Interest, spoke with Richard Burt in late March in Washington, DC. Burt is chairman of the National Interest’s Advisory Council and a former assistant secretary of European and Canadian affairs and U.S. ambassador to Germany.

Jacob Heilbrunn: Both Donald Trump and President Obama seem to have one thing in common: they complain about “free riders”—our allies in Europe and Asia that are relying on the American military to protect them rather than spending on their own defense. What’s your take?

Richard Burt: I do agree with those who argue that one of our great advantages is that we have a number of allies, and some of them are themselves strong, both in Europe and in Asia. At the same time, I agree with Donald Trump that there is a free-rider problem. I just noticed today, for example, an editorial in the Financial Times where Nicholas Burns, a former ambassador to NATO, notes that the United States contributes about 75 percent of NATO’s defense budget. But then he goes on to argue—well—there’s nothing really new in that. We’ve done it for many years, so that’s the price of leadership.

The reality is, that kind of equation is not sustainable. The American people are not going to be willing to pay for three-quarters of combined Western defense spending for a Europe whose GDP is larger than that of the United States. So there is a fundamental free-rider problem—both in the case of NATO in Europe, as well as Japan, South Korea and to a lesser extent Australia in Asia. The Europeans can’t have it both ways: they can’t on the one hand ask for American leadership and expect American protection and worry as they do about the threat of terrorism or—at least in parts of Europe, Russian aggression—and at the same time spend a vastly smaller portion of their budget than the United States does. Germany, which is of course the strongest economy, the strongest country in Europe, spends just a little over 1 percent of its GDP on defense, while the United States spends almost 4 percent of its GDP. So over time, that equation has to change.