Pentagon to reduce military ‘burden sharing’ as Western alliances decay

The Pentagon will reduce military ‘burden-sharing’ with allies. Some will take the move as a sign of deepening Trumpian rot between the US and its allies. The news comes days after US president’s extended rant at the World Economic Forum (WEF) where he said everyone present would be speaking German if not for the US.

The forum was held in Davos, Switzerland – where German is an official language.

Anyway…

The Pentagon’s new National Defence Strategy (NDS) follows on from Trump’s National Security Strategy (NSS), published in December. The NSS called for, among other things, an ethnically purer Europe.

Here’s what it says…

Pentagon: hemisphere and homeland

Trump wants fuller control of the Western hemisphere and the ‘homeland’: that’s why he has threatened Greenland and attacked Venezuela. It’s also why his private fascist militia has been executing nurses on the streets of Minneapolis.

The NDS document is scathing, to say the least. One passage reads:

It is only prudent for the United States and its allies to be prepared for the possibility that one or
more potential opponents might act together in a coordinated or opportunistic fashion across
multiple theaters. Such a scenario would be less of a concern if our allies and partners had spent
recent decades investing adequately in their defenses. But they did not.

In Trumpian style, the strategy bemoans allied spending on provisions for basic human needs:

Instead, with rare exceptions, they were too often content to allow the United States to defend them, while they cut defense spending and invested instead in things like public welfare and other domestic programs.

The current US administration even take a swipe at their predecessors, blaming them for allowing the situation:

it was a decision often encouraged by past U.S. policymakers, who imprudently believed that the
United States benefited from allies who were more dependencies than they were partners.

Now the US seems to want allies to pull their socks up, tidy their room and… you get the picture.

The good times are over

The strategy’s authors say the ‘easy’ times for US allies have come to a close:

Fortunately, that is over now. As President Trump has made clear, our allies and partners must
shoulder their fair share of the burden of our collective defense.

This is the right thing for them to do, especially after decades of the United States subsidizing their defense. But it is also vital from a strategic perspective—both for us and for them.

Naturally, the author’s (bear in mind the report is signed off by sycophantic US defence secretary Pete Hegseth) suck up to the president:

And thanks to President Trump’s leadership, since January 2025, we have seen our allies beginning to step up, especially in Europe and South Korea.

Burden sharing essential

Burden-sharing, they said, is “an essential ingredient” of future US policy. Interestingly, the strategy also centres national wealth in its decision making:

America’s alliances and partnerships form a defensive perimeter around Eurasia. Not only do these relationships offer favorable geography, but they also include many of the world’s
wealthiest nations. Taken together, our alliance network is far wealthier than all our potential
adversaries combined.

That’s two major strategy documents in a row which have set out a new-look America. More violent, even more inclined to lean into law-breaking at home and abroad, and more cut off from the world. The document reads half like a ‘bro’ self-help book and half like a Reform UK voter’s pub rant.

It’s hard not to feel we’ll be living with its implications for a long time to come.

Featured image via the Canary