Samantha Power on NATO countries stepping up to the plate on defense spending

She talks with Tyler Cowen on various things, including her new book, Education of an Idealist: A Memoir.

COWEN: Why won’t Germany and some of the other larger NATO countries spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense? Germany’s not even coming close. How can that make sense? How can they expect NATO to last? Isn’t NATO a good deal for them? From a game-theoretic point of view, please explain that to me.

POWER: Yeah, I find it outrageous. But I also noticed over the last couple decades that we’re really good at understanding our own domestic politics, and even with some of our closest allies, we tend not to internalize or pay much attention to their constraints.

And the real problem — this isn’t just about defense spending, but there’s a big problem across Europe in that if we were in a world of referenda, I’m not sure many of these European countries would have defense budgets or would even have militaries in some cases. So, if you ask, “Should they?” the answer is, “Unequivocally.” Is it an incredible deal for them? Yes. Should they be alarmed by the fact that successive presidents, who are very different — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump — have all harped on this issue, Trump of course the most vocally and tweet-ily and not, to this point, very effectively.

But nonetheless, we all agree that there has to be burden sharing, and I mentioned earlier a kind of shriveled constituency in the United States that we have to win back. The way we in the United States will build back the kind of foreign policy that our European allies want to see us having is when they find a way to step up and bring their constituents along.

Maybe there’ll be an opening in a post-Trump world where we can, because on some level, we, as American leaders, have to speak directly to the constituents who then elect the parliamentarians who then pass the budgets. It’s not a bunch of dictators who are like, “I’ve done a public opinion poll, and they don’t want to go the full 2 percent.” This is about the chancellor of Germany also has to get that budget through a parliament and a coalition government and so forth.

Again, I’m not an apologist for their politics, but I’m a believer that they need to work a lot harder to try to change their constituencies, just as we’re going to have to do the same on this end.

COWEN: Should the United States have 800 military bases in about 70 countries and territories? Under what theory of the world does that make sense?

POWER: And as I note in my afterword, we are performing some form of counterterrorism operation now in 40 percent of the countries in the world. Of course, not all us performing combat roles or anything like that, but some kind of support or combat role in 40 percent of the countries.

No, there has to be a right sizing for the sake of the families who are the ones who bear this burden because that is not actually the face of America that is the most winning face. Our soldiers, of course, are making an amazing contribution in some of those places, but having these large bases where locals don’t get to even interact that much with our soldiers — it perpetuates a perception of America as a militarized nation.

But also it speaks, I think, to the imbalance that I write about as one of my conclusions in the book. How can it be that we have almost more people serving in military marching bands than serve as diplomats representing the United States when our military leaders are the first to say that they can’t do the conflict resolution, they can’t deal with the underlying socioeconomic or ethnic or other tensions, or the land grabs, or the climate change that shrinks the resources that people are fighting over?

They’re just a set of problems where we need the other tools in our arsenal, and other countries comparably need to expand their diplomatic and socioeconomic benches to be able to pool our resources to make more of a difference to deal with the causes of these conflicts rather than just setting up bases and playing whack-a-mole. [...]

And there’s a real gap in the international system around police. There’s actually very, very scant police training capability. If you think about global goods and collective goods, training other cities’ or other countries’ police forces, depending on how the police are structured, is an incredibly important investment in the rule of law, or prodding them to train their own police, or for themselves to hold their own soldiers accountable.