Which allies would that be? The same ones that refuse to pony up their share of the NATO purse?
"Their share"? I'm tired of this nonsense peddled by people without the first clue of what NATO is, how it was formed, and what its purpose is. There is
NO rule in the NATO charter or in any NATO documentation stating that the members have to pay
anything. NATO was an American invention, we were the one pushing for it, so we could have bases of operation for our armed forces in Europe. They were meant initially
just to be infrastructure for the United States Armed Forces. Places to refuel, rearm, rest and redeploy our men and material. That's it.
The 2% number bandied around? That pompous dumbasses have claimed the other member-states should be paying? That wasn't a rule. It was a
suggestion. Why didn't we make it a rule? We could've. We have the over-whelming majority of the power in NATO after all. But why didn't we? Because the people actually running the United States Military know that NATO does more for us than it does
any other member-state. NATO provides the logistical backbone of American military might. Our Airforce in particular
depends on NATO bases.
The ones we have to rescue about every twenty years or so?
Spare me this jingoistic garbage. European forces(largely Anglo-French) played
the vital role in the ground operations during the Yugoslav Wars, and that is both before and after the United Nations organized the likes of SFOR, KFOR, IFOR ad etc.
Europe is not to blame for whatever "problems" exist regarding NATO, made-up and otherwise, because
we're the ones who built it, pushed for it, wrote the charter, so on and so forth. This was our baby. We cajoled numerous states to join.
You want to start fixing NATO? Then make it more than just a glorified extension of the United States Military. Because that's what it was when it was first created, and that's what it is to this day. These problems are of our own design. Trump is the first President to raise a serious fuss* about how NATO is run. Coincidentally he is also the single least-qualified individual to have ever won the office.
I wonder if those two things are somehow related.
*Obama and Bush jr both brought up they'd like to see some European members expand their responsibilities within NATO, but they never phrased it in the childish insulting manner Trump has, probably because Trump is just a tactless moron.