Description
Though military spending attracted attention from those studying burden sharing, other measures are available. NATO Common Funding partner share agreements offer an alternative measure of burden sharing differently capturing functioning costs. Those agreements determine each partner’s share, as a percentage, towards the institution’s ‘households’ (i.e., regional commands, headquarters). They are the outcomes of regular intra-alliance bargaining as such this study uses partner share comparisons spanning the last quarter century. This article explores 1. whether there was ‘simultaneous bargaining spillover’ from the UK’s EU withdrawal within regular-continuing NATO share negotiations by examining its 2020 observed (relative to expected) shares aligned with several years of ongoing Brexit bargaining and 2. if the US shifted its share since the start of post-cold war enlargement (and to whom). Evidence from the 2020 CF agreement indicated the UK accepted a greater share after leaving the EU but not disproportionately based on the employed method. Comparing partner share shifts across 25 years from seven agreements illustrated the US passed parts of its share to several partners. Moreover, the club consented to a 2019 American proposal recasting its bargaining structure facilitating predictions using the selected method. Finally, this article presents a method (from comparative development studies) to understand expected partner shares from comparative underlying wealth while comparing if partners undertook each’s respective wealth-expected NATO partner shares using both simultaneous bargaining and collective action explanations. It also presents a replicable measure of burden sharing, ranging from exploitation to free riding which is a substantive empirical and conceptual contribution.
