Transcending Two Percent: Toward a Prioritarian Model of NATO Burden-Sharing

Abstract

This article argues that NATO's current burden-sharing regime, which I term the proportional model of NATO burden-sharing and which obligates each NATO member to allocate at least 2 percent of its GDP to defence, is deeply flawed from a purely ethical standpoint. This is because the proportional model omits from its approach to distributing the burdens of collective defence two morally relevant ally-level characteristics: namely, individual level of economic development and individual level of external threat. The model therefore treats unfairly both those allies characterised by especially low levels of economic development and those allies characterised by especially high levels of external threat, relative in each case to the alliance-wide average. The article argues that the proportional model should be replaced by that I term the prioritarian model of NATO burden-sharing, which is grounded in the normative theory of prioritarianism from the distributive justice literature. The prioritarian model would morally improve upon the proportional model by incorporating the aforementioned two ally-level characteristics (level of economic development and level of external threat) into its burden-sharing system in the form of two action-guiding prescriptions. The prioritarian model is therefore the fairer of the two models and consequently should be adopted by NATO.