NATO Defense Responsibility Sharing And Its Impact On US-EU Relations

Since Trump's presidential campaign began in 2016,NATO's defense burden sharing issue has become the focus of controversy between the United States and Europe.For the alliance,burden sharing is an important issue.Being a model of military alliance,NATO is facing the problem of unbalanced sharing of military burden.Throughout the ages,NATO's defense burden sharing has shown the characteristics of that “the United States assumes a lot while the European allies burden insufficiently”.Since the establishment of NATO,the imbalance of defense burden sharing has always existed.During the Cold War,the United States and Europe had controversies on many issues successively,such as rearmament of West Germany,the issue of US troops in Europe,conventional forces of NATO,US-German offset negotiations,etc.Since the end of the Cold War,the United States has made adjustments to its policy towards Europe and NATO,however,the contradictions between the US and European allies about NATO's defense burden sharing remain.In recent years,due to the impact of the economic crisis in 2008,the performance of the European allies in NATO's collective defense has been difficult to satisfy the United States.At the end of 2016,Donald Trump was elected as the 45 th of the United States,which has a great impact on US-Europe relationship.Trump advocated “NATO is obsolete” and demanded that the European allies meet the NATO guideline to spend a minimum of 2% of their Gross Domestic Product(GDP)on defense.Under Trump's pressure,the disputes of defense expenditure have become the focus of NATO's burden sharing issue.As the divergences increases,the US-Europe relationship will enter an adjustment period.The author believes that there are many factors leading to the disputes between the United States and European allies on NATO's defense burden sharing,including the differences in circumstances,strategic gaps and the contradiction of control and anti-control.The disputes have led to the rift of US-European relationship and will have continual influence on Transatlantic relationship.This article will describe the development historical outline of NATO's defense burden sharing and analyze the impacts of this issue on US-European relations.