The Trump Administration Misses the Point Again about Burden-Sharing

President Trump and his advisers are beating the drums again about the need for greater burden-sharing by U.S. allies. In early August, Trump demanded that South Koreans pay “substantially more” than the current $990 million a year for defraying the costs of U.S. troops defending their country from North Korea. Just days later, Richard Grenell, the U.S. Ambassador to Germanyblasted that country ’s reluctance to spend more on defense and its continued reliance on U.S. troops for protection. “It is offensive to assume that the U.S. taxpayers continue to pay for more than 50,000 Americans in Germany but the Germans get to spend their (budget) surplus on domestic programs,” Grenell told a German news agencyComplaints about allied “free riding” did not begin with the Trump administration. Earlier generations of frustrated U.S. policymakers voiced similar sentiments. As I discuss in arecent article in the American Conservative, though, the obsession with financial burden-sharing misses a far more fundamental issue. The tendency of U.S. allies to skimp on their own defense spending and instead free ride on the bloated U.S. military budget certainly is annoying and unhealthy for America. But the more serious problem is that Washington ’s array of promiscuous defense commitments to allies and security dependents is increasingly imprudent and illogical.Not only are such obligations a waste of tax dollars, they needlessly put American lives at risk, and given the rising ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs