There was a time when NATO wasn’t preoccupied with percentages.
In fact, for almost the first quarter century of its existence, the western alliance’s annual publication of defence expenditures amounted to a one-page spreadsheet which listed, without comment or qualifications, the defence budgets of its handful of members. (Today it is a multi-page, multi-metric, multi-chart extravaganza.)
These days, those figures have political consequences. Witness the blast that followed this week’s Washington Post story reporting that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told NATO allies that Canada will not meet the alliance’s benchmark of spending two per cent of its gross domestic product on defence.
But where did that
