Quali fondi per quali armi? L’Alleanza atlantica fra impegni finanziari e dibattito sulle capacità

Since the end of World War II, defence expenditure and its allocation have been a constant source of concern in US-Europe relations. Even before the establishment of the Atlantic Alliance, both the Congress and the Joint Chiefs of Staff expressed doubts about the sustainability of Washington’s permanent and large-scale commitment to European security. In the following years, despite the constraints the Cold War imposed, the issue repeatedly surfaced. For instance, in the first half of the Fifties, President Eisenhower believed that evoking burden sharing would have positively shocked the European allies’ inertia in the military realm. Since the Nineties, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the redefinition of NATO’s tasks, the issue has taken on new relevance in the light of the US global repositioning, Europe’s growing ambitions for strategic autonomy, and the increasing divergence among their respective priorities. Against this backdrop, the 2014 Celtic Manor “pledge” – reconfirmed in 2023 at the NATO Vilnius summit – which sets 2% of GDP as the minimum ceiling that allies should allocate to their defence budgets, only partly succeeded in composing the rift between the two shores of the Atlantic. Moreover, the pledge has faced growing criticisms regarding both its quantitative aspect and its usefulness. Beyond the symbolic value and its possible stimulus effect, several authors have questioned the actual meaning of a “simple” quantitative target. On the one hand, it has been claimed that some allies’ commitment in terms of men, matériel and participation in NATO’s activities more than compensates for their limited financial contribution; on the other, it has been pointed out that the difficulties the Atlantic Alliance is currently facing are not due to scarce expenditure but to the inability to tackle the existing capability gaps; a problem that has little to do with both the Celtic Manor pledge and – to a certain extent – the burden sharing issue itself