Power, contribution and dependence in NATO burden sharing

ABSTRACT

This article offers three new types of variables for computation of the share that NATO countries should contribute to the common defence. I use Uppsala conflict data (UCDP) on conflict participation to reveal how the asymmetry in power that allows the US to define most of the framings on which NATO’s utility calculations are based, compensates for the greater material contribution made to NATO by the US. Then I follow Ringsmose’s model of NATO burden sharing and create two types of variables crucial to the calculation of burden sharing. One reveals the share of US military protection aimed at protecting its NATO allies. The other measures how much US global security efforts against tyranny and terror are dependent on NATO allies. These two variables are developed by means of computer-assisted discourse analysis of US Presidential Papers. The three new variables contribute to a more complex mathematical model on fair burden sharing, indicating at the same time that the imbalance between US and allied contributions is declining. If European allies have ever exploited the United States in the past, then at least the relationship has become more even during the past two decades.

KEYWORDS:

• Burden Sharing
• Public good
• game theory
• NATO

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Liz Bramsen for constructive comments on this article, and to Brett Edwards, Wali Aslam, Scott Thomas and Mauricio Rivera for fruitful conversations on the topic of this article. I am, of course, alone responsible for interpretations and possible misunderstandings that this article contains.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Professor Timo Kivimäki joined the University of Bath in January 2015. Previously he has held professorships at the University of Helsinki, University of Lapland, and at the University of Copenhagen. Professor Kivimäki has also been director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (Copenhagen) and the Institute of Development Studies of the University of Helsinki. In addition to purely academic work Professor Kivimäki has been a frequent consultant to the Finnish, Danish, Dutch, Russian, Malaysian, Indonesian and Swedish governments, as well as to several UN and EU organisations on conflict and terrorism. In his new book Failure to Protect. The Path to and Consequences of Humanitarian Interventionism. (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing) Professor Kivimäki reveals some new patterns in contemporary warfare, and makes sense of them by looking at political discourses and cases of humanitarian intervention. Kivimäki’s previous book Paradigms of Peace (London: Imperial College Press, 2016) assesses the contribution of various social scientific paradigms to peace research and peace and sets an agenda for constructivist pragmatist peace research. The Long Peace of East Asia by Kivimäki (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014) offers a constructivist understanding of the relative peace of East Asia since 1979. Kivimäki’s book, Can Peace Research Make Peace. Lessons in Academic Diplomacy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), was nominated for the prestigious Best Book Prize by the Conflict Research Society in year 2014. Kivimäki’s recent articles on peace and conflict topics were published in the Chinese Journal of International Relations, Pacific Focus, the Pacific Review, International Relations of the Asia Pacific, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of International Relations and Development, Asian Security and the Middle East Policy.

ORCID

Timo Kivimäki http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1735-9170

Notes

1. According to Trump’s post-summit statement in London: “I have just come from a truly productive NATO summit. My priority was getting NATO members to pay their full and fair share”. (Politico 2018).

2. The data produced for these variables and the coding on NVivo of the presidential papers and the quantitative data on relational frequencies (Kivimäki 2019b) are openly available in NVivo and Stata formats respectively, from the replication data depository of the University of Bath, Research Data Archive at doi:10.15125/BATH-00535.

3. This examination of total military spending not only raises the question of why the United States has to put up with contributing a disproportionate share of the military spending of NATO countries, but also why NATO has to spend as much as it does. Since burden relates to benefit, one could ask whether the excess burden is really needed, and instead of increasing allied military spending, the US should reduce all spending that does not add to security for allies or the US. According to NATO and SIPRI (NATO 2018; SIPRI 2018), NATO’s military spending is currently greater than that of all the rest of the world put together.

4. This verbalisation of the mathematical logic can be found in (Kivimäki, 2003). In this verbalisation, the difference in utility for negotiator A between a negotiated solution on A’s terms and no solution is described as dependence on a negotiated solution. This is what is sometimes called the critical risk. The smaller this risk is, the more negotiator A is willing to push for her own terms. The difference in utility for player A between a negotiated solution on A’s terms and a negotiated solution on B’s terms is described as determination. The greater this difference is, the more negotiator A is willing to fight for her own terms rather than yielding to the terms of player B. In most of the verbalizations of the logic of bargaining the latter element is forgotten and international security scholars have only taken the critical risk into account when considering bargaining strength. The discussion in economics on price sensitivity (which affects the price) focuses, however, solely on the second element of bargaining strength, the determination to stick to one’s own acceptable terms/price of an agreement/purchase.

5. While this is the game theoretical explanation of the idea of considering contributions in relation to GDP, the political and theoretical debate on burden sharing has suggested many alternatives to this. Kunertova, for example, shows that the GDP share was also used as an indicator of the ability to pay as in the metaphor of tax systems, where citizens pay in accordance with their income (Kunertova 2017b; See also Ringsmose 2010).

6. For the same conclusion, see (Jakobsen 2018).

7. This deficit for the US comes from the American security guarantee, while for European allies it comes from the entrapment to out-of-region operations of the United States.

8. For the US, this utility comes from allied participation in US operations outside Europe, while for European allies it comes from the US security guarantee.

9. For a pessimistic assessment based on the consequences to conflict fatalities and state fragility of NATO’s protective global operations, see (Kivimäki 2019a, chap. 4).

10. An overview of the development of the broader role and its relationship with burden sharing can be found in (Jakobsen 2018).

11. Similarly, one should also measure how much of the defence effort of US allies contributes to US security, but comparisons between the value of contributions of US allies to US and allied security have not yet been made.

12. Based on US Defence Manpower Data Center data (see, https://www.dmdc.osd.mil/appj/dwp/dwp_reports.jsp).

13. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States 1989–2012 (Washington D.C.: US Government Printing Office). The years after 2012 are not yet in the format required for the NVivo analysis of the content. Thus, the focus here is not on the very recent, but generally on the entire field of post-cold war years up until 2012.

14. To have an equal emphasis in each year, I have calculated these percentages from annual shares, rather than shares from the entire period.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Bath.