NATO’s two percent metric is reductive and politically fraught but offers lessons for better ways to measure burden sharing.

Once the West gains control over the coronavirus, NATO and its national defense establishments will have to conduct a hard-nosed assessment of the longer-term military implications and requirements that flow from the current reality—that pandemics can, within weeks, debilitate populations, sink economies, shutter borders, degrade military operations, and fragment unity among the closest of allies.

While movement towards the two percent may seem slow, it is clear that NATO allies are making significant changes to their defense spending.