Strategic Culture and Burden Sharing in NATO

What is it about?

NATO allies who demonstrate more ideological affinity for the United States spend more money on alliance priorities than those who don't, and this is a big deal. Previous scholarship has mostly identified systemic factors as driving burden sharing behavior. Unfortunately, those factors are not really susceptible to policy action to improve burden sharing. For example, richer countries facing more palpable security threats may indeed spend more on defense, but it is hard to imagine a situation in which countries could or would alter their GDP or the behavior of their potential rivals in order to affect defense spending. So identifying a non-systemic driver of burden-sharing behavior is quite significant.

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Why is it important?

Sharing the burden of common defense is an important issue that has drawn a lot of attention from many quarters - recently U.S. President Trump has made it a priority. At the 2014 Wales Summit, NATO allies agreed to increase defense spending - aiming to spend 2% of GDP on defense by 2020 and 20% of that defense spending on new equipment. But scholars and policy makers are not terribly clear on what actually drives allies to make such budgeting choices. By identifying strategic culture as a possible driver of defense spending choices, we have drawn attention to a policy lever that may be available to countries wishing to help equalize burden sharing among allies.

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