As NATO leaders gather for a key summit in Lisbon, expect the newspapers to be full of
the usual “why bother” commentary. NATO, they will argue, was founded for a different age and is not relevant for dealing with today’s threats – from cyber-attacks to
nuclear non-proliferation. It is even struggling to deal with older threats, such as the Taliban insurgency.
Most Europeans do not seem to mind. They feel safer than at any time before and worry predominantly about post-material threats, not conventional attack, as a think tank report showed recently. As a result, Europeans are set to spend less on defence. Germany expert Hans Kundnani has an excellent piece on Berlin’s anti-militarism over on ECFR’s new blog.
What Europeans do spend on defence remains ill-spent on bloated, stationary forces that are of little use in today’s world.
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