NATO's Military Decline -- Wall Street Journal
As Russia re-arms, the West increasingly neglects its defenses.
Vladimir Putin and his American apologists like to blame NATO's post-Cold War expansion for his territorial conquests, which ignores that the alliance refused in 2008 to let Georgia and Ukraine even begin the process of joining. Those are the two countries the Russian has since carved up, and the question now is whether Russia's expansionism will slap Western leaders out of their self-defense slumbers.
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen sounded the alarm last week in a visit to Washington. "I see Crimea as an element in a greater pattern" of Russian strategy, he told an audience at the Brookings Institution. Moscow's annexation of Crimea, he said, is "a wake-up call" that "must be followed by increased European investment in defense." He might have included the U.S.
The combined GDP of NATO's 28 member states tops $30 trillion. Yet with few exceptions, most notably Poland, NATO defense expenditures have declined since the end of the Cold War. The nearby table shows the relative defense spending in 2013 for some key NATO countries as a share of GDP. Only four members—the U.S., U.K., Greece and Estonia—spent at least 2% of GDP on defense.
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My Comment: The money was spent elsewhere .... and these policy decision are now catching up to the European politicians who made them. But what is worrisome is that Russia knows that NATO is just a shadow of it's former self .... and they are now using this advantage by doing what they want in Ukraine .... with no fear of NATO retaliation.
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