NATO, to mean anything real, needs much more than money… it needs real will.
Defense takes more than money, it takes the willingness to do whatever is needed, by all of its official members and by most of the citizens. So, sadly, even if all NATO members spent 2 percent of their GDP on defense, which would be good, that would not suffice.
In this respect Donald Trump’s calls to NATO and Europe in terms of: learn how to stand on your own two feet or otherwise deal with it on your own, serves as a necessary wake-up call. But, not only for Europe, because Trump, unwittingly, with that also evidences how much things have changed in America.
Let me extract the following from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Commencement Address at Harvard University titled “A World Split Apart”: He said: “A decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites… Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice… Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?"
To further make his point with almost cruel preciseness Solzhenitsyn also stated: "The majority of the people [in the Western world] have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, preparing them for and summoning them toward physical bloom, happiness, the possession of material goods, money, and leisure, toward an almost unlimited freedom in the choice of pleasures. So, who should now renounce all this, why and for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one’s nation must be defended in an as yet distant land?"
When was the last time a high NATO official, in prime-time, reminded the young, and the not so young, of why it exists, and of why it still serves, effectively, a vital purpose?
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