NATO needs more than money to solve its Russia problem

Donald Trump knew what he was doing with his threat not to defend NATO if the alliance refused to spend more on defense, asserting he would tell Russia they "can do whatever the hell they want." On both sides of the Atlantic, a double-figure reaction on the political Richter scale was triggered. NATO officials pressed allies that were not meeting the 2 percent of GDP commitment to defense to do so. But reality must intervene. Counterintuitively, the more that is spent on defense, certainly in the U.S. and United Kingdom, the more their forces have shrunk. The reasons lie in…