WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Wednesday questioned Mr. Ian Brzezinski, Resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, and Dr. Karen Donfried, President of the German National Fund of the United States, at a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing marking the 70thanniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the importance of the strategic partnership moving forward. During the exchange, Murphy questioned whether NATO focuses too much on burden sharing as the means for participation in the organization, and outlined other ways countries can contribute to NATO, including financing energy security efforts to combat Russian influence over Eastern European countries, instead of focusing solely on contributions to military readiness.

“I just want to query you both as to the utility of this obsession that we have about evaluating your participation in the [NATO] alliance based pretty much solely on how much money you spend on troops and tanks and guns. I think that’s a really important conversation to have, but it shouldn’t be what has been, at least for Congress, the beginning and the end of the conversation,” said Murphy.

A complete transcript of Murphy’s exchange with Mr. Ian Brzezinski and Dr. Karen Donfried are below: 

MURPHY: Mr. Chairman, good to see you both, thank you very much for being here. Here’s my theory of the case, and I’d love to hear your responses to it. I think that Russia delights in some way shape and form in our obsession over the two percent threshold. Our evaluation of whether countries in NATO are standing up capabilities necessary to defend themselves is essentially limited to their investment in military hardware. And yet, Russia has been wildly successful in weakening many of our allies, in weakening the alliance without invading a single NATO country. They have developed over the course of time, all sorts of old-fashioned and newfangled capabilities, whether it be the spread of Russian backed propaganda, whether it be the allure of their natural resources, or just old-fashioned corruption, and graft, and bribery that’s done significant damage to countries in the alliance and on the periphery of the alliance. I think we made the right move to put a big annual commitment into the European Reassurance Initiative. We spend a lot of money on that on an annual basis, four billion dollars, and I think it’s money well spent. But I also think that Russia delights in the fact that we spent four billion dollars on military hardware on the border, and zero dollars on actually trying to get countries in Europe to be energy independent of Russia. So I just want to query you both as to the utility of this obsession that we have about evaluating your participation in the alliance based pretty much solely on how much money you spend on troops and tanks and guns. I think that’s a really important conversation to have, but it shouldn’t be what has been, at least for Congress, the beginning and the end of the conversation. Is it time a.) to actually update the way in which we decide whether countries are full partners in the alliance? Is it time to say that we are going to count something other than just military hardware into the equation? Or, if not that, what are the other mechanisms by which we can acknowledge the actual capacities that Russia has and the lack of those capacities that exist inside the alliance today, especially given how we talk about countries’ contributions? That’s my question to you, and I’d love to hear both of your thoughts. 

BRZEZINSKI: Senator, on burden sharing, the two percent is imperfect. The two percent metric is imperfect, but I like it because it's simple and it's proportional. And when I look at what I suppose what drives it, what is driving the two percent metric, is the need for ready deployable forces, that on day one are ready to go to battle. And NATO has struggled from day one of its existence in getting all allies to ensure that they are making a proportionate contribution to that military readiness. 

MURPHY: Let me ask, I see where you’re heading with the answer. Do you think that NATO should be engaged in those other questions of security, or is that something that should happen in a different forum? If you are talking about energy security or information security, are those conversations that shouldn't happen inside of NATO?

BRZEZINSKI: Because of the nature of conflict and competition today, the alliance will have to play a role and have to have capacities in cyber domain and to a certain degree in the information domain. It will have to have its antenna up to watch and observe hybrid-operations by our adversaries. But if you go back to the Cold War, and you look at that time and the way we defeated the Soviet Union, the West, led by the United States, had a multi-dimensional strategy. It had the alliance with the pointing of the spear, pointed east, it had sophisticated political operations to support dissidence and different movements in the Soviet bloc in the Soviet Union. It had a fairly massive information infrastructure called the United States Information Agency. They were all coordinating together as part of a national and as part of an allied response to the challenge posed by the Soviet Union at that time. So when I bring those lessons to today, I see an alliance that has to improve its military readiness, it has to be aware of what's going on in the other domains. But I see a real gap between the amount of resources that a country like Russia or a country like China puts into information hyper-operations compared to what we do. You know, I think when USIA was shut down in 1998 or 99, it had roughly a budget of about three billion dollars, 20 years ago. I think our information operations budget is half a billion dollars in the US government, if that. And, kind of dissipated among different organizations, not centralized in an information agency as it was in the past. 

DONFRIED: If I can just jump in with two points. First, I would completely agree with you that it is important to focus not only on money and how much money is spent. It matters how that money is spent. Russia spends much less than NATO-Europe does on defense. Part of the reason that Europeans are getting less value for their Euros is because of the inefficiencies, redundancies, and clash of culture across Europe’s militaries. So there are many metrics that we need to look at in terms of having a more capable alliance. First point. The second point is NATO should have a holistic view of security, and issues like energy dependence matter, information warfare matters, and those are areas that I think buttress the point I was making earlier, that greater cooperation between NATO and European Union is important, because many of those issues are places where the EU also has capacities. So I do think we in the transatlantic space need to have a holistic view of security and need to be looking at this set of metrics.

MURPHY: I appreciate those responses, I just think we get awfully boxed in by this conversation around two percent, first because it tends to exclude capacities that are just as important as the military capacities. And second, to your point, Ms. Donfried, it has nothing to do with integration, so you can be spending that two percent in a way that doesn’t integrate into the rest of your partners and be meeting the metric that the president says is the end all and be all of sufficient participation. Coordination, the quality of your spending, is important as well. I don’t deny the utility of having a number, but we should also have a means of being able to evaluate how you spend it too. 

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