Defense News:
The last year has been an interesting one for NATO. A more aggressive Russia and an increasingly unstable Middle East made the mantra of collective defense for the first time since the Cold War seem to be, perhaps, not enough.
At the same time, U.S. President Donald Trump continued to pound a fist about the need for allies to contribute their fair share, to not rely so heavily on the United States for their own national security and to not necessarily expect the U.S. to come running if the threat of conflict grows imminent.
For all of those reasons, we enter 2019 with what seems to be a more emboldened NATO — or shall I say, more emboldened allies. Individual countries are investing more in defense, less to appease the United States and more to close their own gaps in domestic security. There’s heightened effort to secure borders, to counter domestic terrorism and to invest in missile defense to deter regional adversaries.
