NATO at 70: Pledges, Free Riding, and Benefit-Burden Concordance

For 2011–2017, this paper revisits NATO burden sharing in light of recent developments and pledges to bolster members’ defense shares of GDP to 2%. Russian nationalism, enhanced transnational terrorism, and intrastate conflicts are apt to increase the publicness of NATO defense spending over the last eight years. When NATO allies’ defense shares of GDP are correlated with their GDP ranks, there is clear evidence of the exploitation of the large, rich allies by the small, poor allies, indicative of allies sharing purely public defense spending since 2011. Such exploitation and free riding has rarely been seen after 1967. In addition, there is an absence of concordance between NATO allies’ defense burdens and their derived benefit shares, consistent with greater defense publicness. Finally, we find further proof of exploitation and free riding for a broad-based measure of security spending.