NATO’s next challenge: How to reverse years of underfunding defense
The 75-year history of NATO can be described in three acts, each defined by existential threats to Western security.
First, there was the Cold War and the Soviet threat. Act Two came in the 1990s and 2000s, when NATO deployed troops for the first time in Bosnia and Kosovo, followed by Afghanistan and Iraq. From 2014 onwards, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine and ISIS’s self-proclaimed caliphate brought armed threats right back to the alliance’s borders at a time when the United States and its allies were slowly retreating from the world.
NATO’s fourth act may be defined by a crisis that has unfolded in slow motion. For over a decade, allies have chronically underspent on defense while the West’s adversaries modernized and bolstered their own military capabiliti...