President Trump has constantly attacked American allies for failing to do their share of the work for collective defense. His hectoring, however tactless in execution, is hard to argue with on the merits.
Only seven of America's 29 NATO allies meet the bare minimum threshold of spending 2% of GDP on defense — and three of those seven are the tiny Baltic states. German impotence is particularly galling: Though extremely prosperous and influential, Germany is utterly unwilling to fix its laughingstock of a military.
The situation in Asia and the Middle East is less glaring than in Europe, but all around the world rich American allies expect to free ride on the power of the US military. President Trump's refusal to escort the merchant ships of other nations in the Persian Gulf was the first substantive attempt to make the burden-sharing rhetoric a reality.
The president would do well to find a national security adviser who regards the current American alliance structure with the skepticism it deserves. Retired Army Col. Douglas MacGregor, reportedly a finalist for the job, has accurately labeled NATO a "zombie."
President Trump should disregard ossified foreign-policy thinking and choose an adviser who sees eye-to-eye with him on these four critical issues. Perhaps this fourth national security adviser can be Trump's last.
Gil Barndollar is a fellow at Defense Priorities and the Military Fellow-in-Residence at the Catholic University of America's Center for the Study of Statesmanship. From 2009 to 2016 he served as an infantry officer in the US Marine Corps, deploying to Afghanistan twice, to Guantanamo Bay, and to the Persian Gulf. He holds an AB in history from Bowdoin College and M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in history from the University of Cambridge.