The dark blue is just the United States defence spending; the light blue is the other 28 countries who enjoy that defence. The power of the United States remains potent, and is something that NATO should focus on keeping on their side; consider the Navy alone, who operates in two-thirds of the surface of the planet. Consider the jump carrier and super carrier; it takes 7 jump carriers to take on a super carrier.

There are 21 active jump carriers on Earth; 11 are American. 2 are British. 1 is Thai. 1 is Russian. 2 are Italian. 1 is French. 1 is Chinese.

There are 11 super carriers on Earth; all are American.

At the current rate of build up, the rest of the planet combined will take until 2240 to match U.S. naval power (Zeihan, 2019). Even rough maths of putting everything into jump carrier power levels will put the U.S. at 88 jump carriers worth of power to the rest of world’s 10 combined jump carriers. The U.S. is going to remain the military super power for a long time.

In terms of competitors, such as China, the Chinese have a single jump carrier and many small ships, and only 30 Chinese ships are able to sail more than 1,000km from shore (Zeihan, 2019); we’ve covered this in more detail here. The British Navy has become nearly irrelevant (but can at least project across most of the globe). Russian Navy is an oxymoron; Italy has always preferred to stay in the Mediterranean.

As the United States (and some allies) have been paying their dues and other nations have not, we have seen a rising disinterest in NATO by the United States, and particularly President Trump, who has called upon NATO to start picking up the bill and defending itself. There is a shift in U.S. perspectives; it is no longer willing to suffer at its own expense for the sake of its allies, and is beginning to assert itself not only to third world dictatorships, but to its supposed allies (Zeihan, 2019). We have discussed how the U.S. is becoming less and less dependent on international trade and needs it less and less; as such, the U.S. can (and is) going it’s own way.

Unhappy, Unreliable Allies



Germany has been forced by pressure from President Trump to increase their military spending to 2%, and has promised to do so…by 2031. In 12 years. German forces are so underfunded they famously turned up to NATO training exercises with brooms instead of guns, having so few (Taylor, 2019).

Canada has been forced by the U.S. to accept non-favourable deals; in an article I wrote earlier, I point out that Canada is no longer so kindly beloved by U.S. policy makers, but now is seen as a competitive trade nation. It used to be protected by the United States because it was useful as a security ally (the old ‘Canada is America’s hat’ joke), but also because the Canadians often are the first allies to join the U.S. in wars, and as seen below, willing to jump to defend NATO countries; in this they are good allies, but the U.S. doesn’t need that now, and Canada has used it’s position to leverage better and better trade deals with the U.S. over time; something that has now been stopped (and whose benefits have been removed from NAFTA) under the current U.S. administration (Zeihan, 2019).

France’s President Macron recently stated that he did not know if NATO’s collective defence via Article 5 was still valid, and that Trump’s leadership was effectively the ‘brain death’ of NATO. Germany’s Chancellor Merkel rejected this claim, saying that was a drastic claim, and ‘not [her] point of view’ (Erlanger, 2019). But I do wonder if Macron is actually closer to the truth.

According to data of 11,000 people by Pew Research Centre, the majority of Germans (53% vs. 40%) would not defend a NATO country being attacked by Russia, Spain is on the balance (46% vs. 46%), the U.K. is marginally defending a nation (45% vs. 43%), France is just willing to do so (53% support); it seems only the Netherlands, the Polish, Canadians, and the Americans are largely willing to help out if required (Strokes, 2019). But many of the powerful European NATO nations have populations who wouldn’t actually want to fight; they support NATO (broadly), but wouldn’t back it up. When asked about specific countries, we find that most people would not be willing to actually defend countries with actual effort rather than words. Here is a graph from YouGov (2019):